Subject: RE: [RRG] Renumbering...

From: "Fleischman, Eric" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:00:45 -0700

Tony,

I concur with you that ISPs will usually be strongly motivated to
support their largest customers so that the PI space will be supported
indefinitely for both IPv4 and IPv6. If this would not be the case, then
the largest end users may become motivated to take action themselves --
such as to decree ourselves to be our own ISPs (i.e., this is just one
of many scenarios that large end users have toyed with since 2000).
Regardless, however you cut it, I believe that the PI space will exist
and I recommend that you emotionally accept that probability. More
pertinently, I recommend that RRG accepts PI support as a requirement
for advancing any RRG variant.

I believe that some of our current worldwide Internet scaling issues are
a direct function of correctable BGP protocol behavior, notably
associated with how BGP handles policy issues. I am curious how many of
these scaling issues would diminish if BGP policy was implemented
slightly differently.

I am also of the opinion that many RRG alternatives, including those
which do map and encaps, well support an Internet future that includes
large PI spaces. I do not believe that a large PI harms RRG in any way. 

I resonate strongly with the distinction between identifiers and
locators and believe that the Internet architecture needs to become
oriented to implement that distinction for numerous reasons, the most
important of which is security, which I believe is the greatest single
threat to the Internet's continued viability. Once this distinction
becomes deployed, then a whole lot of problems currently limiting the
Internet just go away. If you make the PI space be defined within the
identifier space, then why wouldn't both the re-addressing and PI issues
disappear?

I do not resonate with the "gloom and doom" embedded in your comments
below. Rather, I would like to remind you of an excellent paper that
Mark Handley wrote in the BT Technology Journal (Vol 24, No. 3, July
2006, pages 119-129) which he entitled "Why the Internet only just
works."

--Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Li [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 5:06 PM
To: Fleischman, Eric; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: RE: [RRG] Renumbering...

Hi Eric,

<snip>

Which implies that there will always be a swamp.  Further, since ISP's
sales departments are always going to be competitive, they will
(continue to) accept everyone's PI's, leading us back to the point where
the routing subsystem will fail to scale, ISP's margins fail, and prices
go up across the board.  

<snip>

My point is that it will become an end-user problem in the long run,
regardless.

<snip>

Do you suppose that that might involve renumbering?  Or would the
obvious pain (increasing prices) have to exceed the tactical pain of the
renumbering operation?

<snip> 

I hear you, but to me it still sounds like you'll end up burning your
suppliers, and that somehow just doesn't seem like a sound strategy.

Tony

--
to unsubscribe send a message to [email-masked] with the
word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
archive: <http://psg.com/lists/rrg/> & ftp://psg.com/pub/lists/rrg