On Jun 3, 2013, at 9:22 AM, Ted Lemon <ted.le...@nominum.com> wrote:
> On Jun 3, 2013, at 9:46 AM, Owen DeLong <o...@delong.com> wrote: >> I believe that making bits available for greater flexibility in consumer >> networking is a good use of bits. >> >> I believe that stealing bits from the consumer for purposes of allowing the >> provider to overload the IP address with yet more unrelated meaning >> (semantic identifiers) isn't a good idea even if it didn't involve stealing >> the bits from consumers. > > But these arguments are mutually contradictory, since the bits are in fact > making use of the added flexibility IPv6 gives to consumer networking. What > you seem to be saying is that we need to preserve the ability of end-users to > spend bits like water by stopping ISPs from spending them. Being an > end-user, I have a lot of sympathy for your position, but I don't think this > is something on which the IETF is likely to achieve a strong consensus, and > that's okay. Whether you like semantic prefixes or not, they are something > that ISPs are experimenting with, for reasons they think are valid. What we > should be talking about is not whether they can do these experiments, but why > they are doing them. > No, they are not. They are stealing from the consumer's flexibility to provide (questionable) functionality to the provider. I am not saying that consumers should be able to spend bits like water. I'm saying that consumers should get their intended 16 bits of flexibility. No more, no less. If you said consumers should get /44s per end site because they need additional flexibility, I'd be asking you to prove use cases. But the original protocol design intended 16 bits of flexibility and the address size was calculated to include that. As to what we should be talking about, we should, indeed be talking both about why providers are doing these experiments and also why this type of overloading of unrelated meaning onto address bits is an inherently bad idea. Fortunately, we are talking about both of those things. Owen
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