> Keith, I don't understand what you are saying here. As I read > his note, Vernon isn't saying "make all the applications > recognize a particular address range and do something special". > He is saying "ok, we don't think this is useful, but, if it > would help you to have an address range to do your own thing in > your own way, addresses are just not that scarce". scarcity isn't the problem. just because something is plentiful doesn't mean you want to pollute the water supply with it. and no, it's not okay to say "you can pollute your own water supply if you want to", because that stuff flows downstream to everybody else. > I'd love to stamp out all of the wrong-headedness and stupidity > in the world, but I would not expect to succeed and have largely > given up trying except for isolated local cases. Efforts > through the centuries to make and enforce laws against stupidity > and stupid behavior have not been very successful. nobody is proposing we make or enforce laws against stupidity. what is being proposed is that we take a practice that is now widely acknowledged to be stupid, or at least harmful, and say "oops, sorry, this turns out to have been a bad idea. please don't do this" maybe we can't outlaw stupidity, but that doesn't mean we have to encourage it, or even be silent about it. > I'm not as > convinced as you are that, to use Vernon's description, "Site > local addresses are utterly stupid and wrong", but, even if I > were, I'd be having some trouble convincing myself that taking > the relevant address range out of the allocation pool and > leaving it out would be seriously harmful to the network and to > interoperability. well, so would I, and as I understand it, that's just what is being proposed. I don't have any problem with IETF/IANA saying "the addresses formerly allocated to site-local will never be re-assigned". I do have a problem with IETF giving any support to the notion that it's reasonable to use site-local addresses.