On Mar 13, 2012, at 12:34 PM, Jay Daley wrote:
On 14/03/2012, at 7:59 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
And here is the crux of the matter. Fear of scarcity because of long history with IPv4 being in
a state of scarcity is driving many of our IPv6 mistakes.
Possibly, but at the same time an irrational abandonment of consideration of scarcity leads to ridiculous allocations like the handful of /19 and /20s given early on in the process. Those allocations in turn then leads to friction with those who now won't get such huge blocks and so feel that once again they've been shut out of the developed world club.
Care to point to specific for-instances? I don't know of any actual cases of /19s or /20s that I would necessarily consider ridiculous.
I keep hearing of these mythical creatures in these debates, but, they almost always break down when I ask for specifics.
For example, the much-touted allocation to US DoD in the ARIN region is often characterized as a much larger allocation than it actually was because what was allocated to DoD was several much smaller blocks with a lot of holes in between the address blocks. Admittedly, those holes are being treated as a reservation which led to ARIN requesting additional space from IANA, but, the holes are not allocated to DoD and I expect in the future would start being issued to other organizations.
One of the major lessons I've learned from running a registry is that we must treat resources as scarce, even if they are not, otherwise we run quickly into the tragedy of the commons as people take far more than they need and we end up with scarcity after all.
I think we should hand out resources reasonably according to need. If we treat them as scarce, then we create different tragedies. It is a balancing act. Currently, IMHO, APNIC's IPv6 policy is out of balance and rather strongly weighted towards an IPv4 level scarcity mentality.
Several years ago, I observed an interesting and similar phenomenon in Russia while I was visiting. There were food shortages according to the news, the people I talked to, and just about every other information source you can imagine. If you went to a food store more than an hour after it opened, indeed, the shelves would be relatively barren.
However, each night, each of the stores was fully restocked. People's homes that I visited were so full of foods that they were having difficulty figuring out where to store things. However, because there were "shortages" everyone was running to the store each and every morning when they opened and buying as much food as they could possibly get their hands on. Of course this created the empty shelves that were viewed by the media in the afternoon creating the continuing story of shortages. The only people still at the stores to interview by the time the media showed up were the ones that arrived after the morning buying frenzy was over.
Owen