Re: [RAI] Global Service Provider ID - draft-pfautz-service-provider-identifier-urn-01

[Dean Willis <[e-mail]>]

On 9/27/11 11:19 AM, Richard Shockey wrote:
> +1
>
> Of all the things to worry about here I doubt this is one of them.
>
> Personally I think folks and enterprises small or large prefer buy services
> from service providers even if the service provider is internal to the
> enterprise or cloud. Life is too short.

Having once been in the business of setting up internet connections for 
small technology companies all the way up to big retail/industrial 
firms, I can say that most of them really WANTED to own their IP address 
space so that they could, if they wanted to, dual-home it via two 
connections and advertise the routes via BGP routing adverts. I 
therefore suspect that more of them want to have SPIDs than you might 
expect.

So while I think that SPID is a Very Important Thing and I'm strongly 
sympathetic to the "just reuse ITAD" argument (and no, the reference to 
"telephone" in ITAD doesn't bother me; all of telephony and all of the 
Internet are semantically merging anyhow), it does seem that we might 
want to think about address space concerns.

We're at about ten billion entities today -- some "natural persons", 
others "legal persons" like corporations, co-ops, government branches, 
independent business units of a larger entity, ships, factories, 
warehouses, office buildings, and so on.

With any luck, the population will merely double over the next 
generation. It could be worse. Also with any luck, we're going to need 
comms identifiers for interplanetary and perhaps extrasolar resources. 
Not to mention the "internet of things". How many SPIDs does a swarm of 
von Neumann probes 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine) require so that 
all of those little ETs can phone home? Just one, or are they going to 
subdomain by stellar cluster?

While I don't expect every entity to require a SPID, there's an argument 
to be made that the number needed might well exceed 32-bits worth at 
some point in time.

Consider also the model of "permanent allocation". We don't currently 
reclaim ITAD numbers from failed entities or those who no longer need 
them. Given churn and time, that will eventually eat up a lot of 
numbers. If we only issue a million a year, we burn through 
4,294,967,296 in a mere 4,294 years. But if we're issuing a hundred 
million a year, we've only got a 42 year window.

Of course, one could do "reclamation" within a number space. For 
example, the PEN registered to KRAP might, on Hadriel's expiry, be sold 
with his effects. This artificial scarcity potentially creates a 
lucrative market. Consider that New York City taxicab medallions have 
historically been a safer investment than gold; supposedly they have 
never declined in value, and currently sell for somewhere north of 
$600,000 each. I believe that New Mexico state liquor licenses have 
similar properties. If we have a 10% annual reclamation cycle, we can 
issue 4.2 million "recycled" numbers a year in perpetuity.

But if it isn't our intention to assure a perpetual funding model for 
IANA based on artificial scarcity of numeric resources occurring a few 
hundred years from now, perhaps we'd benefit from a larger address space.

On the other hand, perhaps we're being wildly optimistic about the 
importance of the SPID and the future demand for them.

One might also note that 32 bits is a nice fixed-length number in binary 
(32 digits), quaternary (16 digits), or hexadecimal (8 digits). Why are 
we restricting ourselves to 10 decimal digits, which doesn't map to 
anything binary in a very nice way?

--
Dean