Earlier, I suggested that an ISP could delegate addresses out of its
existing aggregated, global unicast address block for free without
providing connectivity. Having seen all of the email on this subject,
I believe that such an ISP could actually sell prefixes for which it
doesn't provide direct connectivity. Such addresses could be used for
VPN's, etc. without fear of collision. Traffic destined to such
addresses on the Internet would be aggregated to the ISP, and probably
sent to /dev/null. For an additional fee, the ISP could tunnel such
traffic back its customers. The prefixes would be sold for a fixed,
one-time fee.
Pros
====
no collisions:
Multiple ISP's could sell prefixes in such a manner, and there
would be no fear of collisions.
no fear of increasing fees:
The fee for such prefixes would be one-time and fixed. This
would be bound by a legal contract with the customer.
hijacking similar to existing system:
The danger of "evil" ISP's doing "evil" things is equivalent
to our existing system. Furthermore, this is mitigated by the
fact that there is no well known prefix, such as fee0::.
Cons
====
no convenient prefix:
Since any ISP could sell addresses in such a manner, there is
no convenient prefix such as fee0::. Thus, OS's cannot
provide default address selection behavior, nor can firewalls
automatically filter such prefixes.
out of business:
It's still possible that the ISP might go out of business.
Hopefully, the ISP could provide paperwork to its RIR
concerning all of the customers that had purchased such
prefixes so that the RIR could avoid reallocation of such
address prefixes.
Best Regards,
-jj
--
Hacker is to software engineer as
Climbing Mt. Everest is to building a Denny's there.
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