WG Action: Conclusion of IP Version 6 (ipv6)

Tue Oct 2 13:57:15 UTC 2007

> On Oct 1, 2007, at 9:15 AM, John Curran wrote:
> > What happens if folks can somehow obtain IPv4 address blocks
> > but the cumulative route load from all of these non-hierarchical
> > blocks prevents ISP's from routing them?

drc at virtualized.org (David Conrad) writes:
> Presumably, the folks with the non-hierarchical address space that  
> might get filtered would have potentially limited connectivity (as  
> opposed to no connectivity if they didn't have IPv4 addresses).

i had a totally different picture in my head, which was of a rolling
outage of routers unable to cope with "full routing" in the face of
this kind of unaggregated/nonhierarchical table, followed by a surge
of bankruptcies and mergers and buyouts as those without access to
sufficient new-router capital gave way to those with such access,
followed by another surge of bankruptcies and mergers as those who
thought they had access to such capital couldn't make their payments.

call me a glass-half-full kind of guy, but the picture in my head in
response to john's question is of a whole lot of network churn as the
community jointly answers the question "who can still play in this
world?" rather than "how useful will those new routes really be?"
internet economics don't admit the possibility of not-full-routes, and
so david's view that nonhierarchical routes won't be as useful as
hierarchical makes me wonder, what isp anywhere will stay in business
while not routing "everything" if other isp's can route "everything"?

we're all in this stew pot together.
-- 
Paul Vixie