Re: Redeploying most of 127/8, 0/8, 240/4 and *.0 as unicast

[Fred Baker <fredbaker.ietf () gmail com>]

Sent using a machine that autocorrects in interesting ways...

> On Nov 18, 2021, at 5:15 PM, John Gilmore <gnu () toad com> wrote:
>
> Keeping the price of IPv4 addresses reasonable means that dual-stack
> servers can continue to be deployed at reasonable cost, so that it
> doesn't matter whether clients have IPv6 or IPv4.  Any company that put
> its services on IPv6-only sites today would be cutting off 65% of their
> potential customers.  Even if v6 had 90% of the market, why would a
> company want 10% of its prospects to be unable to reach its service?

I find myself thinking about Reliance JIO, an Indian company. Iirc, their IPv4 and IPv6 statistics are in the slide 
deck they presented to the IETF a year or two back, and they came to me/us a little later wanting somehow expand the 
IPv4 address pool. In short, most of their services are IPv6 only. The only thing they want IPv4 addresses for is their 
enterprise customers, who want an IPv4 option wherever IPv6 is an option - so they don’t have to select IPv6.

That’s all we’ll and good if the IPv4 addresses exist and work globally.  Someone (was it you?) noted earlier in the 
thread that it might be acceptable to provide IPv4 address space that only worked in certain places. I find myself 
thinking about the arguments for a global DNS root. What a regional IPv4 connectivity limit creates is a network that 
doesn’t work everywhere, meaning that the government of <> will be incented to deploy that address space locally within 
their country and provide a national NAT firewall to somehow protect their citizens - because of course the bad guys 
are always somewhere else. Kind of like the US wants to regulate encryption because nobody outside the US uses it or 
whatever. WHATEVER!

I tend to think that if we can somehow bless a prefix and make be global unicast address space, it needs to become 
Global Unicast Address Space.

This is becoming a rant, so I’ll stop…