[ih] Internet without entrenched factions?

[Eliot Lear]

On 15.05.2026 08:35, Ole Troan via Internet-history wrote:
> Back to history. IPv6 should have had identifier/locator split from the start. I wasn’t there, but I understood it was close with Mike O’Dell’s 8+8 and GSE proposals? Anyone who can shed more light on what happened and why that path was not chosen?

There were two reasons it failed.  On the technical front, nobody 
actually seriously analyzed the security properties of what it means for 
p1:a to be the same as p2:a, such that an attacker couldn't pretend to 
be a.  That was key because 8+8's supposed benefit was 
redundancy/mobility without having to advertise a end user prefixes.  
Mostly, however, economics didn't demand the solution.  We had enough 
memory and CPUs to keep things going, so that's what happened.  Same 
reason that neither ILNP nor LISP took off to solve the problem later in 
the decade.

I just took a look at the CIDR report; eyeballing it, FIB growth looks 
stable, and I'm not hearing routing vendors worry in the way Tony 
worried when the situation was a LOT less clear in the 2000s (Tony was 
quite right to worry).

Eliot

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