[ih] IPv8...

[Craig Partridge]

Yes there's a way for stations to put up their hand and say "interested".
Actually multiple ways -- finding better ways to build the graphs (as they
are source specific) ate up a lot of mindshare in the early 1990s.
Craig

On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 9:46 AM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> Thanks for the correction.
>
> Not terribly precise, but I wouldn’t expect that.
> I presume there then has to be some method for notifying stations and
> links that they should be willing? Seems to be an unnecessary complication.
> In most multicast proposals/implementations I have seen, an application
> requests to join a service that uses multicast, which would seem to make
> ‘willingness’ moot.
>
> (Applications shouldn’t have to specifically request multicast. The
> provider determines whether to simply send n copies or use multicast. It is
> the provide that benefits, not the application.)
>
> Thanks again,
> John
>
> On Apr 21, 2026, at 11:31, Craig Partridge <craig at tereschau.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 8:58 AM John Day via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> Let me try to provide some other definitions of multicast and anycast
>> that will either help or confuse things.
>>
>> First the definition of multicast in the Internet is patterned after
>> multicast in Ethernet. That definition assumes that all stations see all
>> packets, which implies flooding. This is what happens in Ethernet so it is
>> quite natural and works well. However, it isn’t so useful for general
>> networks, where one would like to avoid flooding. Perhaps a better more
>> abstract definition would be:
>> (I hesitate to call it a multicast *address* even though it is taken from
>> the IP address space because an address is location-dependent and
>> route-independent. That doesn’t really apply to multicast in general.)
>>
>
> You clearly don't understand Deering's contribution to multicast.  He took
> the semantics of Ethernet multicast and generalized it to an Internet such
> that "all stations see all packets" but rather only those stations and
> links willing to receive/carry the multicast address (or, if you wish, a
> group of multicast addresses of which the target multicast address is one)
> see the packet.
>
> This simplification also applies to anycast in an Internet context.
>
> Craig
>
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