Re: the race to the bottom problem

[Nick Hilliard <[e-mail]>]

Joel M. Halpern wrote on 08/11/2020 00:00:
> I am not sure what data you are looking for Nick.

honestly, I'm not sure that any useful data even exists which suggests 
that right now, this entire "race to the bottom" discussion is an 
echo-chamber affair.  As Barbara points out (correctly, imo), the entire 
discussion is based on FUD and it's about time that this working group 
acknowledged this.

> History does tell us that ISPs give out very long prefixes even when 
> they do not need to.

Addressing scarcity has been an issue since before we had functional or 
widespread access services.  Also, provisioning mechanisms in the early 
days of access services were bereft of functionality, which meant that 
doing anything other than a single ipv4 statically-assigned /32 was 
troublesome and non-scalable.

There's never been a period where commodity ipv4 access products were 
available and where ipv4 addresses weren't a scarce resource, and 
scarcity has been the primary driver of addressing assignment policies 
since commodification of internet access services.  So this line of 
argument is not valid because there isn't a scarcity of ipv6 addressing 
resources.

Nick