Fergie's Tech Blog

The Importance of Address Allocation Policies

My old pal, Geoff Huston, does a great job of discussing the important issues involved in IP address allocation policy -- specifically, the ITU-T proposal put forth for allocating IPv6 addresses to national registries.

An excerpt of Geoff's article:

When does an experiment in networking technology become a public utility? Does it happen on a single date, or is it a more gradual process of incremental change? And at what point do you change that way in which resources are managed to admit a broader of public interests? And how are such interests to be expressed in the context of the network itself, in terms of the players, their motivation and the level of common interest in one network? While many may be of the view that this has already happened some years ago in the case of the Internet, when you take a global perspective many parts of the world are only recently coming to appreciate the significant role of the Internet in the broader context of enablers of national wealth.

I'd like to take one example here to illustrate the forms of issues that arise when public policy considerations of a national nature are added into a resource management debate.

posted by Fergie @ 5/09/2005 04:55:00 PM