202203071610.AYC Re: Making Use of 240/4 NetBlock

Mon Mar 14 04:26:11 UTC 2022

On Mar 12, 2022, at 8:15 AM, Abraham Y. Chen <aychen at avinta.com> wrote:
> 
> 2)    On the other hand, there was a recent APNIC blog that specifically reminded us of a fairly formal request for re-designating the 240/4 netblock back in 2008 (second grey background box). To me, this means whether to change the 240/4 status is not an issue. The question is whether we can identify an application that can maximize its impact.
> 
>     https://blog.apnic.net/2022/01/19/ip-addressing-in-2021/  

I think there might be value in reviewing the discussion of the related Internet Drafts

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-deshpande-intarea-ipaddress-reclassification-03
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?q=draft-deshpande-intarea-ipaddress-reclassification

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-wilson-class-e-02
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?q=draft-wilson-class-e

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-fuller-240space-02
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?q=draft-fuller-240space

The walkaway I had from these discussions was that while changing the definition of the address space would allow RIRs to sell more IPv4 address space for a few weeks (such as happened to APNIC when the last /8's were handed out), there were not enough addresses in the identified pools to solve the address shortage. So it was in the end a fool's errand. If you want to have address space to address the current shortage, you need an addressing architecture with more addresses. 

I was there for those discussions, and I'm not sure how to put it more simply.