3177-bis

["Tony Hain" <alh-ietf@tndh.net>]

The fundamental goal of this draft is just misguided. It is essentially
trying to get the IETF to revisit history & restate the IAB's
recommendation, in order to align it with the persistently short-sighted
policies of the RIR's. Due to their core objectives, the RIR's are incapable
of supporting innovation and looking to the future because they are focused
on the past, as their measures of 'fairness' are based on historical
measures of efficient deployment of technologies and networking models from
the last century. The call for 'reasonable' is a prime example of how
quickly this will fail, because perceptions of 'reason' that are based on
the past will never accommodate future innovation.

There is no math justifying the assertion that a /56 actually solves the
collective set of goals. In particular, the scare tactic reference
[ROUTE-SCALING] has no substantiating documentation, and even cursory
thought about the problem would expose the point that moving bits from local
to global routing will only make any scaling concerns worse. The arguments
at the mic today about fragmentation due to having to get additional space
are an artifact of RIR policy, and no matter what size the IAB/IETF
recommends, the RIR policies will insist on small periodic blocks for
'efficiency' (read that as power to say no), which will result in
fragmentation over time. The other argument at the mic today about needing
something longer than a /48 to avoid RIR policy to register assignments in
whois, completely misses the point that it is the RIR policy that has
failed, not the recommended size. For example, a policy that said 'any
deaggregate which results in an explicit DFZ table entry is required to have
a whois registration', would make much more sense than one that assumes all
units of the same size have the same policy. There is no reason that end
site assignments that are aggregated into the DFZ would need their own whois
entry, but rather than fixing RIR policy, there is an expectation that the
IETF/IAB should change to accommodate their unwillingness to act.

The half-hearted discussion about bridging possibly not being desired,
completely glosses over the point that time after time it has been shown
that bridging between media types is prone to failure, and that there will
be new media types that emerge during the lifetime of IPv6. Given the uproar
over a past technology that only allowed a single cell to consume 10
microseconds of link time, and that for the 100Gbps link Comcast used this
week a full-sized Ethernet frame only consumes 120 nanoseconds of link time,
we are already past due for a new framing technology. Whatever it is, there
will be routed rather than bridged interconnection of those. (never mind
that the IETF is supposed to be focused on L3 approaches, not promoting
bridging of a 30 year old L2 one)

The discussion about paying fees to get additional space is probably
inappropriate, because it presumes that the IETF knows this is a bad
business practice. The real goal here is to note that justifications on the
past are irrelevant and can't be assessed appropriately when talking about
future deployment needs. There are 281,474,976,710,656 /48's (minus special
use prefixes), so claims that we will run out are absurd. The fact that the
RIRs started out applying a host measure to what is a subnet assignment
reality does not mean that the IAB was wrong. What it means is that people
need to use real math justifications to back up their claims, not just vague
notions of a problem that will never exist. 

Tony