worse than IPv6 Pain Experiment

Wed Oct 9 18:19:42 UTC 2019

In article <23963.65395.763065.591307 at gargle.gargle.HOWL> you write:
>So I proposed we dump numeric addresses entirely and use basically
>URLs in IP packets and elsewhere.
>
>I really meant something like 'IP://www.TheWorld.com' in the
>source/dest addr, possibly more specific for multiple interfaces but
>whatevs.
>
>Leave out the implied 'IP://' and my example is 16 chars just like
>IPv6.
>
>Routers could of course do what they like with those internally such
>as maintain a hash table to speed look-ups. Not anyone outside of
>router software developers' problem. ...

This is more or less equivalent to using device MAC addresses
everywhere.

I think that if you talk to people who build routers, you will find
that they depend really heavily on the detail that every IP address
has a network part and a host part, and they route using the network
part.

Ethernet switches send traffic to arbitrary MAC addresses, at the cost
of remembering every MAC address they've seen, typically in a table
with a few thousand entries.  I know you've been on the net long
enough to remember the good old days when there were only a few
thousand URLs, but I fear it's unlikely we'll go back there.

R's,
John