[lir-wg] Discussion about RIPE-261

"Clive D.W. Feather" wrote:
> 
> Hank Nussbacher said:
> >>> Needless to say, your numbers do not seem to take in any
> >>> socio-economic factors.
> 
> > So don't assign wealth.  Use some number that has direct influence on IPv6
> > usage.  Among the possibilities:
> > - # of computer per capita
> [...]
> 
> IPv6 is supposed to last for what, 20 years? 30 years? 40 years? None of
> these assumptions is going to be valid in this timescale because you have
> no idea where the economies of countries are going to go. After all, in
> 1985 none of us would have assumed either the Soviet Union or China would
> have wanted any IP addresses at all. And people wouldn't even have heard of
> Kazakhstan.
> 
> Either population or land area is about the best indicator you're going to
> get of *eventual* *long-term* demand.

Am I the only one who thinks that geographical/population distribution
of IP[v6] addresses is a flawed and evil concept in itself?

The problem of IPv6 is that is has become an utopian kitchen sink. The
current discussion about how to distribute the address space the "right"
way is symptomatic for that.

Why should an IP address have *any* kind of specific geographic
meaning? Is it even smart to have that? Oh, you've got an IP address
from Germany, we don't allow access to this server. Oh, you've got
an IP address from China, we don't allow access to China critcal
information (BBC server)...

Can anyone tell me why an IP address should be geograhically
significant in this way? Doesn't this open a can of worms of
potential abuse all over the place?

Why do we try to fix an engineering problem (scaling global routing
mesh (BGP)) with unworkable IP address distribution policies???

Even countries change from time to time. See the split from .su to
a whole bunch of .ru and so on. When does a "country" deserve it's
own IP segement? Is for example Nothern Ireland a country is the
sense of IPv6 address assignment? What about East-Timor? What if
in 10 years northern Iraq is going to be the Republic of the Kurdes?
Do they have to renumber from Iraq and Turkish addresses? What if
in 20 years the European Union countries vote to become one nation?
Do they have to renumber? Or will you assign by "federal state"?
Why don't we just take the E.164 telephony numbering scheme and
make IP addresses out of it? It's already country based! Not!

What point does it make that we have got an IP address space so
large so we can assign an IP number to every grain of sand on this
planet if it can't keep the number?

IPv6 has a number of fundamental design (I call it over-eager-
engineering) flaws. All it should have done is to extend the
address length, make the header fields fixed length and aligned.
All the other stuff of creating a whole new way of doing networking
like header stacking and so on is evil. Especially this does not
belong into this layer. We've already got MPLS et al. Don't even
get me started on putting routing information into DNS (IPv6 prefix
in DNS)... shudder...

-- 
Andre