Re: Comments on draft-thain-ipv8-01

Sadly this has been quoted to me by several people because of random
articles online.  Honestly though I cannot see any traction - it almost
reminds me of NSAP all over again.  I can’t see any benefit to it, and I’m
not even sure which wg this would land in.

To the author - while I realise you may have put a fair bit of effort into
writing this document, I honestly don’t see this going anywhere.  It’s
simply not realistic, not practical, and provides zero real advantage and a
whole heap of disadvantages.

Thanks - but no thanks!

Andrew Alston

On Thu, 16 Apr 2026 at 16:45, Andrew <[email protected]>
wrote:

> This was sent to me by … maybe a half dozen people.
>
> Is this some sort April Fools joke?
>
> It seems like, by adopting this whole model, we would gain:
> - Legacy applications can continue using IPv4 sockets (AF_INET and 32-bit
> address types) * but only if they use the system DNS resolver? *
> - We can continue using dot-decimal notation instead of scary hex digits
>
> In exchange, we need to force everyone to adopt:
> - new network stack in every OS
> - new DNS resolver in the OS which can manage prefixes for legacy
> applications (which is architecturally incompatible how resolving works on
> Linux)
> - significantly higher burdens on embedded devices to speak IP
> - new incompatible firewalls
> - new incompatible proxies
> - new incompatible attributes for any protocol which transfers IP addresses
> - new routing metric (which has not been used in any protocol before)
> - new incompatible OSPF
> - new incompatible IS-IS
> - new BGP AFI
> - new DNS record type
> - new address space for IANA+RIRs to manage
> - new access control protocol, which is unlike any protocol we have seen
> before
> - force the use of DHCP again, even though we finally have almost gotten
> rid of it
>
> Compared to IPv6, even if fully implemented into every OS and client and
> router, the proposed protocol would still lack sufficient address space -
> if each ASN has one 32 bit address space, then an ISP who currently has a
> v6 /20 would not have enough space to give customers more than a single
> address, so we are back to NAT again. It doesn’t look like any sort of
> prefix delegation is used for customer networks, so I guess it’s back to
> NAT again anyway?
>
> How quickly can we reject this?
>
> Andrew
>
>