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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: IPv6 Address Planning
On Aug 10, 2005, at 3:22 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: An amusing aspect of markets is that unless there is government involvement, they tend to ignore philosophy and philosophers, resulting in what many may consider sub-optimal decisions (e.g., "reality tv", vhs over beta, and the wide acceptance of NAT). Unfortunately, it is hard to argue with success (although "what are they thinking??" is frequently generated). I am not arguing that the markets are always correct, rather that reality does frequently intrude on the ivory tower.The ISPs have apparently done well in determining what people will pay for. At least those that still exist.There is not enough choice and/or information for the capitalist system to work its magic here. However, to try to not go too far into economic theory, I would suggest that for good or ill, the folks working at/with/for ISPs have a far better understanding of what will keep their businesses afloat than the non-ISP related individuals in the IPv6 working groups. Unless the IPv6 working group can provide a clear and relevant model as to why any particular address partitioning would be better than another in a way that will positively affect the ISP's bottom line, I suspect it will take some Darwinian-like evolution (instead of IPv6 driven "intelligent design") to occur for a consensus to be reached on best common practices for IPv6 addressing. That's exactly the reason why the IETF has such a hard time moving forward: whatever way of abusing IP you can think of, someone is doing it today, and breaking that "feature" will gravely upset them. It's the age old battle between the irresistible force (progress) and the immovable object (users) I guess.One person's progress is often another person's waste of time. In my experience, users are actually quite easy to move as long as you give them real justification instead of FUD and/or marketing hype. They are, however, very gun shy. Rgds, -drc
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