Thanks John for quite interesting post. The only comment I would make is, to the last part, I agree that IP address allocation policy does not directly affect each individual users per se. However, I think it still remains within "public interest" where collective interest of users matters so that ALAC should have say. ie, we do not want to see uneven distribution policies of remaining IPv4 among ISPs, or NIRs or even among RIRs that may cause grey or black market. best, izumi 2007/7/28, John L <johnl@iecc.com>:
If any Internet user could have a reasonably fixed IPv6 address or address range, this would allow a radical change in the way the Internet users interact. Just think that your local e-mail server could just accept connections from about 200 trusted IP addresses of known friends or relatives.
Hypothetically speaking, you're right, but the RIRs don't make their IP allocation policies because they hate individual users, they make them so that the IP space they allocate is actually usable.
Every separately managed chunk of IP space needs a separate entry in the routers at backbone networks. The route table is currently about 100,000 entries, and by heroic effort router manufacturers have been able to handle a table that size. There's no way they'd ever be able to handle a million entry table, much less the billion entry table if every user had his own private chunk of IP space.
I happen to have my own chunk of 256 IPv4 addresses, which I got back in 1995. It's great, I can do all sorts of cool stuff with servers and VoIP phones. One thing I cannot do is to switch ISPs and take my IP addresses with me, because nobody would route them separately. Again, this isn't Sprint (my ISP's upstream provider) being mean to me, this is reality saying that the backbones won't give me one of those precious 100,000 routes. Indeed, even my ISP isn't big enough to merit its own route, and I've had to renumber once when my ISP switched wholesale providers and they had to renumber their whole network.
Assuming that IPv6 becomes common, ISPs could and should allocate a chunk of IPv6 space to each customer, but users still won't be able to take the chunks with them if they change ISPs. At least here in the US, people change ISPs fairly frequently, which means that the list of trusted IP addresses would always be out of date.
This would certainly help eliminate spam.
Not really. If you want to whitelist mail from your friends and reject everything else, there are plenty of ways to do it now with existing software. One of the key things that makes e-mail so useful is that it is (still) possible to use e-mail for first contact, and to send mail to someone you've never written to before.
So anyway, it's true that IP addresses are within the ALAC's remit, but I don't see that there's much of interest for us to say about them.
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
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