Fergie's Tech Blog

The Geography of Internet Addressing

Paul Wilson, Director General of APNIC (and someone for whom I have a great deal of respect), is the author of very well thought out, and articulate, article on the issues facing IP address allocation. An excerpt:

"The ITU-T has proposed a new system of country-based IP address allocations which aims to satisfy a natural demand for self-determination by countries; however, the proposal also stands to realign the Internet's frontiers onto national boundaries, with consequences which are explored here."

The one major problem here is that the ITU-T doesn't (obviously) comprehend is that the Internet knows no national boundries, and allocating address space according to national boundries would significantly fragment the benefits of route advertisement aggregation (CIDR), thus increasing the global "default-free" Internet routing tables. This is a problem, and for the life of me, I just can't quite understand that, after all these years, the "bell-shaped heads" within the ITU can't just stop trying to make the Internet like the telephone system -- it doesn't work like that, folks. Get it? Got it? Good.

(Thanks, Suresh!)

posted by Fergie @ 4/25/2005 07:01:00 PM