[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[Bill Woodcock]

On Oct 12, 2010, at 5:28 AM, Dave CROCKER wrote:
> 
> On 10/11/2010 5:14 PM, John Day wrote:
>> Do you own the address where your house is?  When you move do you take it with
>> you?  Do you get your mail at the address where you were born?
> 
> Are you suggesting that folks find no value in such numbers and that their right to take them from one provider to another has no value?

On the contrary...  It has negative value.  Just as if everyone took their street numbers with them when they moved, and 125 Broadway were next door to 25337 El Camino Real and across the street from 17B Vine Terrace...  It would ruin the aggregation property of the system, which would remove all meaning.  "Easy to remember" is not an interesting property in an IP address except for your bootstrap recursive resolver.  "Uniquely allocated to you" and "aggregated with other like addresses so as to be findable through routing" are the two interesting properties of an address.

                                -Bill