Subject: Re: (multi6) requirements draft comments

From: "J. Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 22:43:23 -0500

> From: [email-masked] (Sean Doran)

    > PI and PA are absolutely _awful_ terms that should be uninvented in
    > favour of something that admits the truth that the optimal choice of
    > numbers is driven by MATH and not by economics, and would clear up
    > confusion among the various competing aggregation root and
    > number-assignment proposals.

I've always deeply hated the terms "provider-based", "provider-independent",
"provider-dependent", and their variants.

(I have this sneaky suspicion that they were invented by people who didn't
like some of the side-effects of CIDR, and tried [unsuccessfully] to stop it
by creating loaded terminology to make it sound bad.)

For the uninitiated (read "most of the world"), it makes it sound like it's
purely a policy decision as to whether addresses are PI or not, and so it's
"clear" to them that one should use PI, since the non-PI alternative provides
lock-in to the ogre providers...

I have tried to get people to use the term "connectivity-based", which is
simple and clear, and accurately conveys what's going on - which is that your
address is based on where you are connected. (This is actually also a more
accurate technical description, since it covers both provider-based and
exchange-based addressing systems [metro is an exchange-based system, BTW]).

However, I've had little luck. Perhaps it's worth another try now... ;-)

	Noel

PS: A side benefit of this is that "provider-independent addresses" becomes
"connectivity-independent addresses", which in its oxymoronicity gives an
immediate read on how silly the concept is. Kind of like "location
independent street address".

---

From: David Conrad <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 20:36:52 -0800

Noel,

> by creating loaded terminology to make it sound bad.)

Actually, no.  The terms (coined, I believe, by Daniel Karrenberg) were
intended merely to be descriptive.  All the folks writing 2050 were pretty
strongly in favor of CIDR.

> lock-in to the ogre providers...

At the time 2050 was being written, it was a (mostly) policy based decision
-- ISPs hadn't yet decided that PI space was something they could tell their
customers they wouldn't route.

> However, I've had little luck. Perhaps it's worth another try now... ;-)

So can I sign you up for helping on the revision of 2050?  :-)

> independent street address".

Were that this were true.  Are you forgetting IP addresses are (currently)
both routing names as well as endpoint identifiers?

Connectivity-independent addresses is only oxymoronic if you assume the only
use address space has is in the context of routability.  Perhaps
surprisingly, this was (is?) not always the case.  There were many (*many*)
organizations that were not interested in routing the addresses but who were
interested in global uniqueness.  No, really.  I'm not making this up.  As
to why the RIRs would even consider allocating such addresses, see RFC 1814.

Rgds,
-drc