Ted,
On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 05:03 PM, Ted Hardie wrote:If you were using some of an allocated portion as routable addresses and some as unrouted addresses, you might be forced to change the unrouted addresses as a consequences of choosing someone new to carry the traffic from the routed portions of your network. That would carry the same pain of renumbering it always does.
Which, of course, implies NAT ("where's there's pain, there's NAT"? :-)).
No. It does not imply NAT. It implies traffic to hosts which are used for purposes which do not communicate to the public network.
Could we PLEASE leave NAT out of the equation? Not all hosts in the world want or need to be connected outside of the corporate network they belong to. Today such hosts are numbered in RFC 1918 space WITHOUT NAT and are connected to corporate networks. It's likely, given the line of argument you're proposing, that many corporations will just laugh at the IETF, and continue to use IPv4 for their private network space.