> Mumble. It's hard for me to buy the idea of there not being a "core" > portion of the Internet from which all public addresses are reachable. i was going to say, "but these addresses aren't public", but then i saw the larger problem, which is that the internet's architecture has guardians who are able to either buy into, or not, various ideas. sometimes this is a good thing, as with the wildcard *.COM that pointed to a sitefinder service. other times this isn't a good thing, as occurred with NAT, firewalls, and application layer gateways. how to tell good from bad? i think it's whether the guardians think the idea is a stupid waste of the proposer's time, or whether they think it will do outright harm. "harm" becomes the important term in that equation... is it harmful to let someone else's idea go forward because it will dilute the need for a better solution? that's why a lot of people think DNSSEC DLV is bad -- simply that it would take pressure off signing the root zone. is it harmful to set up a service that stops RCODE=3 responses from coming back when a nonexistent name ending in ".COM" is looked up? that's what i said when verisign added a *.COM wildcard pointing to sitefinder. without a consensus on what it means "to harm", we're sort of stuck. ULA-G (and therefore ULA-C) would allow consenting adults to exchange routes using the whois and in-addr infrastructure that has historically been reserved for "public networking". lots of people, fearing leakage of "local" to "public", think there is too much latent harm in this kind of centralized locality. in the IETF, the naysayers pretty much kick the consenting adults' asses every day and twice on sunday. and that's the real problem here, i finally think. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf