[Bounced earlier today - excuses if it's a duplicate] On 22-mei-2007, at 13:08, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
So why don't we implement a way for people to get centrally assigned ULAs? The simple way to do this is to sell prefixes of a suitable size (I'm thinking 20 bits worth) to people who are prepared to run a registry for further distribution. In practice, this means that pretty much everyone who sells domains will be selling ULA-cs, too. Simple, easy.
No need to create a market in integers. We can surely invent a robotto allocate and escrow pseudo-random 40 bit numbers at negligible cost,and therefore set up a free service.
True. However, a small incentive against using up space unnecessarily is probably a good idea, and having to track payment is the best possible incentive for keeping good records. If there is also reverse DNS involved this looks almost identical to the domain name business so why not reuse a model that has proven successful in the past?
In any event, in my opinion, it's important to keep the RIRs out of this, because they're not equipped to deal with individual users on the scale that may be required, and having ISPs give out private space the same way they give out public space makes even less sense.