The fact that people plan badly does not mean that all planning must fail. As Tom Knight pointed out when the IPv4 address size was chosen, there aren't enough for one for each person living on the planet. IPv6 has enough addresses to assign a subnet to every grain of sand on the planet. Allocating a /16 for national RIRs independent of IANA and the US government gives other countries the ability to protect their national interests. The specific concern is that the US government can pass a law that prevents Remember that we are trying to build a network that is going to last for hundreds if not thousands of years. I don't think it likely that the RIRs or ICANN or even the IETF lasts that long. If it does it will be in a very different form. What we might think about Steve Crocker or Vint Cerf or whoever is irrelevant, we do not know who their successors will be let alone whether we can trust whoever is in charge in 2040. I do not believe the national allocations are ever likely to be used unless the RIRs screw up or get above their post but their existence provides an exit option in case they ever do. What I am proposing here is the network equivalent of a crumple zone on a car body. Cars are designed to break in very specific ways so as to avoid damage. There is quite a large potential for collateral damage if an event occurs and people start inventing solutions on the fly and there are multiple competing solutions fighting it out. There are privacy implications to this approach but only for battles that have already been lost. Packets are not routed by the IP address in any case, they are aggregated by the ASN number and all that is needed to map those to identify national origin in practice is a lookup table. [Yes there are networks that span national borders but not in countries with ugly types of government where this capability is a concern]. On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Dmitry Burkov <dburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Mark, > I really enjoyed your professional remarks for the years and your deep and intrinsic mind, > but it seems that now it is not a time to discuss the issue that ipv4 is scarce resource :) > > > My opinion that IPv6 was done in the worst manner and we should simply recognize that we have no other way to satisfy industry needs in such short time. > > Nothing personal - as a lot of my friends spent significant part of their life on it. > > Dima > > On Aug 3, 2012, at 10:25 PM, Mark Andrews wrote: > >> >> In message <FB949BEA-5BDB-401A-8A75-E9A9BDAA72A6@xxxxxxxx>, Daniel Karrenberg w >> rites: >>> >>> On 02.08.2012, at 22:41, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: >>> >>>> ... That depends on whether the registry in question is dealing with a >>>> scarce resource or a plentiful one. Having two registries handing out >>>> IPv4 addresses at this point would be very very bad. Having more than >>>> one place you can get an IPv6 from would not worry me at all. ... >>> >>> IPv4 addresses used to be regarded as non-scarce not so long ago. >> >> I don't know what planet you have been living on but it was clear >> IPv4 addresses were a scarce resource 2+ decades ago longer than >> some IETF attendees have been alive. IPv6 was started because they >> were a scarce resource that would run out in the foreseeable future. >> >> Mark >> -- >> Mark Andrews, ISC >> 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia >> PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@xxxxxxx > -- Website: http://hallambaker.com/