Keith, I don't understand what you are saying here. As I read
his note, Vernon isn't saying "make all the applications
recognize a particular address range and do something special".
He is saying "ok, we don't think this is useful, but, if it
would help you to have an address range to do your own thing in
your own way, addresses are just not that scarce".
scarcity isn't the problem. just because something is plentiful
doesn't mean you want to pollute the water supply with it. and no,
it's not okay to say "you can pollute your own water supply if you
want to", because that stuff flows downstream to everybody else.
I'd love to stamp out all of the wrong-headedness and stupidity
in the world, but I would not expect to succeed and have largely
given up trying except for isolated local cases. Efforts
through the centuries to make and enforce laws against stupidity
and stupid behavior have not been very successful.
nobody is proposing we make or enforce laws against stupidity.
what is being proposed is that we take a practice that is now widely
acknowledged to be stupid, or at least harmful, and say "oops,
sorry, this turns out to have been a bad idea. please don't do this"
maybe we can't outlaw stupidity, but that doesn't mean we have to
encourage it, or even be silent about it.
I'm not as
convinced as you are that, to use Vernon's description, "Site
local addresses are utterly stupid and wrong", but, even if I
were, I'd be having some trouble convincing myself that taking
the relevant address range out of the allocation pool and
leaving it out would be seriously harmful to the network and to
interoperability.
well, so would I, and as I understand it, that's just what is being
proposed.
I don't have any problem with IETF/IANA saying "the addresses formerly
allocated to site-local will never be re-assigned". I do have
a problem with IETF giving any support to the notion that it's
reasonable to use site-local addresses.