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Re: Addresses and ports and taxes -- oh my!

2000-08-03 20:10:03
The various proposals to burn IP addresses into devices are naive.

IP addresses identify points in the network topology.  Hence they 
need to be assigned according to topology.  If you try to assign
IP addresses in some other fashion, you immediately need something
else to replace the IP address which is assigned according to network
topology.  And for various reasons that new thing will have a very 
similar structure to an IP address. 

(for reasons of efficiency, IP addresses are also sometimes used to name, 
or as parts of names for, lots of other things - including interfaces, 
hosts, and connection endpoints.  but it's the use of an IP address
to name a point in the network topology that drives their assignment.)

yes, you can add a layer of indirection to the network so that a
device has a constant 'virtual' IP address which gets forwarded to
the 'real' IP address which indicates the current location of the
device.  mobile-ip does this, for example, and it's quite useful
to be able to have a mobile device with a stable IP address.
but then you still need a 'current location' address.  you also need a 
home agent which sits on the net at the location corresponding to
your stable IP address, and either forwards your traffic to the
'current location' address or issues a redirect to that address.

if my toaster is going to be on the net, the last thing I want is for 
all of the traffic for that toaster to go to the toaster manufacturer's 
home agent just so it can get forwarded to my house.   I don't want the
toaster manufacturer to be able to see how often I'm checking on the
status of my toast.  nor do I want to have to pay the toaster manufacturer 
to get it to continue to route packets to my toaster.

burning IP addresses into devices is a good way to give vendors the 
ability to control those devices, monitor their usage, and to lock
their customers in to particular services.  not my idea of a desirable state.

personally, I'd rather have the address registries.

Keith