Paul, this IPv9 hoopla strikes me as another research project harping the nationalistic chord in order to get funding. This is not exactly news. It was a common undertone in many European research proposals in the 1980's and 1990's, and it is also a classic line in NSF or DARPA proposals. The officials in the Chinese government may fall for that line a few times, but I believe that they are smart and will eventually allocate their grants based on technical merit rather than non-technical arguments. There is however an interesting technical point behind all these discussions of number allocations. The general Internet architecture is largely decentralized, but we have accepted to rely on a few centralized functions. The obvious ones are DNS names and IP addresses, but there are many others, such as port numbers and generally the various registries held by IANA. Centralized registries are expedient, and are not a big concern when the network is small, or when the central authority is virtuous. However, the network is big and the central authority becomes a locus of power. The history text books teach us that loci of power attract politicians and politician-friendly profiteers, and the Internet does not appear to be an exception. It seems that we, the IETF community, have been complacent to centralization and have dug ourselves in a centralization hole. We may hope to get out of it by ensuring that ICANN remains in charge and remains virtuous, but that goes very much against all historic precedents. When in a hole, one should obviously first stop digging: that would mean a moratorium on the creation of IANA registries. One should also think hard about technical alternatives to central registries. In some case, that may mean a slightly larger field in a protocol format, so a large random number can be used instead of a short registered number. In other cases, like name resolution, that may require a technical break-through. But we should definitely think about it! -- Christian Huitema _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf