Internic address allocation policy

Tue Mar 21 18:42:14 UTC 1995

    Speaking from a (large) user organization. I am very concerned about
    having the ISPs performing address allocation, particularly aggregating
    addresses. As a user, I want to be able to change my service provider
    if I get a better deal from a competitor or am having service
    difficulties with my current provider. Today's technology for managing
    addresses on individual computers makes it very hard for an
    organization to renumber. Literally every computer administrator needs
    to be in the loop. This can be a large loop when you have 13,000+
    independently managed machines (like we do).

    How do we users get our say to ensure that an addressing architecture
    doesn't come into existence which tends to lock us into a particular
    provider?

The right solution is to add enhancements to the Internet protocol suite to
either automate renumbering as much as possible or to decouple the routing
and addressing system from endpoint identification (in general, end-systems
need only the latter, and adding such indirection would allow the assignment
of addresses to be fully automatic). Unfortunately, while doing this has been
discussed for a long time, not a lot of progress has been made in implementing
and deploying viable solutions. And to make matters worse, it would appear
the next generation of the Internet protocol is likely to do this wrong as
well, which means that while it may provide adequate numbering space for
assign a unique identifier to every atom in the Universe, it may not solve the
route scaling problem.

	--Vince