[ih] IPv8...

[Craig Partridge]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2026 at 1:52 PM John Levine via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> The new approach to fragmentation doesn't work with anycast, as Geoff
> Huston has often
> noted.  Dunno whether they could reasonably have forseen that, but it's
> still a problem for
> large DNS systems.
>

As one of the co-inventors of anycast, I can cheerfully say that as IPv6
was being developed, *nobody* fully understood anycast.  Steve Deering
(central to IPv6) felt strongly that multicast (which he'd played a central
role in making viable) was a better solution to all the problems that
anycast was believed to able to solve.  But beyond that viewpoint, those of
us who thought anycast might be useful were in the early stages of figuring
out what it was good for, and had only a vague inkling of how it might
behave at scale.  I still remember, initially, the sense was "oh, we
discovered a fourth type of addressing [beyond unicast, multicast and
broadcast], isn't that intriguing?"

Craig

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