Re: Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of Cyber-Babel

["Anthony Atkielski" <anthony at atkielski.com>]

Paul Ebersman writes:

> First, assuming that I (as a user of some service)
> must reach a particular, unique machine is a geek
> wish, not a requirement.

Who said anything about users of a service?  I want to reach my parents'
machine.  They are not geeks, and I am not looking for a "service."  Therefore I
must be able to address their machine unambiguously, and this means that their
machine (and mine, for that matter) must have a unique address.

> The folks monitoring and maintaining the machines
> need to be able to get unambiguously to that machine
> but that is a great use of 1918 space.

Only fixed address spaces can be wasted.

> Wasting public IP addresses one per machine when
> there is no requirement seems to violate Anthony's
> claimed concern about address space.

On the one hand, if you assign addresses sequentially, even a 32-bit address
space will last for some time.  On the other hand, if you do not use a fixed
address space, there can be no waste.  So my concern is not violated.

> Anthony rails here about waste of fixed address
> space yet advocates that in order for us to be
> "pure", we must waste an IP address on every device
> that we need to identify as "unique" on the Internet.
> OK, which do you want?

You can have both, if you use a variable address space.

> Better use of address space or a dictated waste of
> address space for a dubious technical "need"?

See the telephone network for an example of how to have both.