Re: (multi6) requirements draft comments

[David Conrad <david.conrad@nominum.com>]

Noel,

On 12/19/01 7:43 PM, "J. Noel Chiappa" <jnc@ginger.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> (I have this sneaky suspicion that they were invented by people who didn't
> like some of the side-effects of CIDR, and tried [unsuccessfully] to stop it
> by creating loaded terminology to make it sound bad.)

Actually, no.  The terms (coined, I believe, by Daniel Karrenberg) were
intended merely to be descriptive.  All the folks writing 2050 were pretty
strongly in favor of CIDR.

> For the uninitiated (read "most of the world"), it makes it sound like it's
> purely a policy decision as to whether addresses are PI or not, and so it's
> "clear" to them that one should use PI, since the non-PI alternative provides
> lock-in to the ogre providers...

At the time 2050 was being written, it was a (mostly) policy based decision
-- ISPs hadn't yet decided that PI space was something they could tell their
customers they wouldn't route.

> However, I've had little luck. Perhaps it's worth another try now... ;-)

So can I sign you up for helping on the revision of 2050?  :-)

> PS: A side benefit of this is that "provider-independent addresses" becomes
> "connectivity-independent addresses", which in its oxymoronicity gives an
> immediate read on how silly the concept is. Kind of like "location
> independent street address".

Were that this were true.  Are you forgetting IP addresses are (currently)
both routing names as well as endpoint identifiers?

Connectivity-independent addresses is only oxymoronic if you assume the only
use address space has is in the context of routability.  Perhaps
surprisingly, this was (is?) not always the case.  There were many (*many*)
organizations that were not interested in routing the addresses but who were
interested in global uniqueness.  No, really.  I'm not making this up.  As
to why the RIRs would even consider allocating such addresses, see RFC 1814.

Rgds,
-drc