NANOG/IEPG/ISOC's current role

Thu Apr 4 09:12:19 UTC 1996

On Wed, 3 Apr 1996, Paul A Vixie wrote:

> sooner or later we will have to kill off the /24's, which make up 70% of
> the routing table but offer way less than 10% of the total reachable
> destinations.  perhaps now that address ownership has been put to bed,
> the gang of big providers can agree on a date after which they will all
> stop listening to or exporting any prefixes longer than /23?  THAT would
> be the incentive the industry needs to look at private addressing and
> aggressive renumbering.  who's willing to risk collusion lawsuits and
> lost customers?  step right up and sign the register please.

You don't risk collusion lawsuits by announcing that you are considering 
this action and strongly urging people to look at RFC1918 and renumbering.
You could probably even get away with something like:

     "NANOG agrees that the only way to avert the pending
      collapse of the Internet (see From The Ether, Infoworld, Apr 1 1996)
      is to stop routing the old Class C networks to reduce
      global routing table sizes. To this end NANOG is strongly
      urging organizations using Class C addresses to either switch
      to using RFC1918 private network addresses or to renumber
      their Class C address into a provider aggregate. By doing this
      you will maintain uninterrupted global connectivity. Action
      to cease carrying the old Class C addresses is contemplated 
      to begin Sept 1st 1996. If you are unsure whether you Class C
      addresses are part of a provider's CIDR aggregate we suggest that
      you contact your provider immediately.

      Before the explosive growth of the Internet occurred 3 years ago
      many people felt that Internet network addresses could be
      assigned permanently and stay with an organization even if it moved
      from one provider to another. Unfortunately the sheer size of the
      Internet is now outpacing the capabilities of state-of-the-art
      routing equipment. NANOG has for some time been encouraging
      new network number allocations to be made out of topologically
      based aggregates so that the global routing tables need only
      maintain a single route pointing towards a local provider. This
      has helped slow down routing table growth, but it is not enough.

      The Internet already has periodic outages caused by the size of the 
      global routing tables and more drastic action needs to be taken.
      NANOG is recommending that major network providers limit the
      size of the routes they carry. This means that they would no
      longer carry routes to the smaller networks which currently take
      up 70% of the global routing table space.

      Information on how to plan for and accomplish renumbering of
      your network is available at http://www.isi.edu/div7/pier/
      You may prefer to renumber using private network addresses
      http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1918.txt
      in order to avoid renumbering in the future."

Did I say anything that indicates collusion? 

Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: michael at memra.com