Subject: Response to appeal by Tony Hain on site-local issue

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 14:44:30 -0400

The IESG has reviewed the appeal by Tony Hain of the IPv6 Working Group 
chairs' declaration of consensus on the issue of site local addresses in 
the IPv6 address architecture.

Tony's appeal requests that the declaration of consensus be overturned due 
to the ambiguity of the question asked.

As is to be expected of a technical discussion where there are many
opinions, the discussion of the site-local issue at the San Francisco IETF 
meeting went all over the map, with many unanswered questions.
However, the question asked by the chairs, with clarification from
the AD, was clear.  "Does the group want to go away from site-local
addressing, deprecate it, work out how to get it out, [or] does
the group want to keep it and figure out what the right usage model
is for it?"  The clarifying statement was "Deprecate [...] means
somewhere to the left of the 'limited use' model?"  The spectrum
of choices, including the 'limited use' model, had been presented
during that same meeting.  Although the group had decided to
rule out the 'limited use' model (and presumably anything to the
left of it as well) in Atlanta, nothing precludes new information
from prompting a review of old decisions.

The question posed on the list was more concise, simply "Should we
deprecate IPv6 site-local unicast addressing?"  This question is
not ambiguous.

The deprecation of site-local addresses in their current form has
served a useful role in forcing the working group to recognize the
problems that the original definition had and work to address them.
The IESG finds nothing unusual about how the question was asked or
how the working group has proceeded.

There is strong consensus in the IESG that deprecation is the
correct technical decision, but we have done our best to separate
our technical preferences from the process issue in considering
this appeal.

In summary, the IESG upholds the chairs' and INT ADs' decisions.

The IESG

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