IPv6 Address Planning

Thu Aug 11 00:46:56 UTC 2005

On Aug 10, 2005, at 3:22 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>> The ISPs have apparently done well in determining what people will  
>> pay for.  At least those that still exist.
> There is not enough choice and/or information for the capitalist  
> system to work its magic here.

An amusing aspect of markets is that unless there is government  
involvement, they tend to ignore philosophy and philosophers,  
resulting in what many may consider sub-optimal decisions (e.g.,  
"reality tv", vhs over beta, and the wide acceptance of NAT).   
Unfortunately, it is hard to argue with success (although "what are  
they thinking??" is frequently generated).  I am not arguing that the  
markets are always correct, rather that reality does frequently  
intrude on the ivory tower.

However, to try to not go too far into economic theory, I would  
suggest that for good or ill, the folks working at/with/for ISPs have  
a far better understanding of what will keep their businesses afloat  
than the non-ISP related individuals in the IPv6 working groups.    
Unless the IPv6 working group can provide a clear and relevant model  
as to why any particular address partitioning would be better than  
another in a way that will positively affect the ISP's bottom line, I  
suspect it will take some Darwinian-like evolution (instead of IPv6  
driven "intelligent design") to occur for a consensus to be reached  
on best common practices for IPv6 addressing.

> That's exactly the reason why the IETF has such a hard time moving  
> forward: whatever way of abusing IP you can think of, someone is  
> doing it today, and breaking that "feature" will gravely upset  
> them. It's the age old battle between the irresistible force  
> (progress) and the immovable object (users) I guess.

One person's progress is often another person's waste of time.  In my  
experience, users are actually quite easy to move as long as you give  
them real justification instead of FUD and/or marketing hype.  They  
are, however, very gun shy.

Rgds,
-drc