What it comes down to is philosophy. It's that simple. It's autoconfiguration's socialism (turned communism?):
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." - Karl Marx
"...all will govern in turn and soon will be accustomed to no one governing." - Vladimir Lenin
Autoconfiguration is the embodiment of these ideals. Routers have an ability which hosts need. No one says what different services different clients receive (or are told to ignore). The network management is from the bottom up - from the end-clients. No one governs.
This, versus DHCP fascism:
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." - Bennito Mussolini
Again, the embodiment of DHCP (4 or 6). The DHCP server is the state, and relays, clients, all of them must succumb to the will of the operator expressed through it.
Now we may debate for years - centuries - perhaps to the end of time - about which of these philosophies (if any of them!) should be applied to social governance.
But I submit that if you are running a network, and you plan to make money doing so, that you probably want to exert some fascism - to be your network's fascist dictator. You probably do not want to even risk the potential chaos if just one autoconfiguration client goes off the deep end and starts making trouble for others.
I suspect IP space will be the problem.
I can agree that IP space is a problem, but I doubt very seriously that it will be the problem.
Either we reform the system so that IP space is more evenly allocated, or we go to IPv6. Four billion is not going to be enough once China and India really start getting wired. Once IP space gets scarce it gets valuable, and that's when the US government will think of export tariffs on IP space, and other governments will think about splitting the internet.
Truth: IPv4 isn't enough addresses, especially if you believe in the utopian ideal that every individual should get at least one globally-routable IP address to themselves, and at best should get one globally-routable IP address for each device they own (all computers, printers, refrigerator, pda, watch,...). Yes, this is why IPv6 exists, and if implemented it would acheive that ideal. But using IPv6 at this time is...problematic.
False: The IPv4 allocation tip towards US institutions constitutes some kind of 'unfair advantage' in the US' favor. This is simple: Gross US allocations were made at a time when allocation policy was open, when the Internet was just beginning (a sort of land grab if you will). Since that time, allocation policy has changed - you must now justify your need for allocation in order to receive it. That wasn't true back then. You could just say, "Hi, I'm, say, a representative of amateur radio operators. We'd like some addresses to experiment with packet radio. Give me a Class A. Thanks. Bye." and InterNIC would (did!) do it, if they thought you were being genuine. It was a kind of "honor system", that people would only ask for as many addresses as they perceived they would ultimately need. And you can imagine, people perceived they needed a great deal (not always out of greed, but sometimes out of not wanting to pollute the global routing table). The practice of justification today means a well documented algorithm called slow start. You start with a small address allocation (a/21 or so), and you must show that you have consumed more than half of it in order to receive another allocation, or to increase the size of that allocation. Your NIC will reserve the covering/20 for you, so you don't have to renumber to recieve a larger single prefix. If it's still available when you ask for more space, it's assigned. If you then need a/19, that's assigned as a different prefix again in a covering/18, so on, so forth.
The Bottom Line: Non-US address allocations are small not because the US is favoring itself, but rather because these countries cannot justify a need for the gross amounts of space that were allocated in times long past.
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What it comes down to is philosophy. It's that simple. It's autoconfiguration's socialism (turned communism?): "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." - Karl Marx "...all will govern in turn and soon will be accustomed to no one governing." - Vladimir Lenin Autoconfiguration is the embodiment of these ideals. Routers have an ability which hosts need. No one says what different services different clients receive (or are told to ignore). The network management is from the bottom up - from the end-clients. No one governs. This, versus DHCP fascism: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." - Bennito Mussolini Again, the embodiment of DHCP (4 or 6). The DHCP server is the state, and relays, clients, all of them must succumb to the will of the operator expressed through it. Now we may debate for years - centuries - perhaps to the end of time - about which of these philosophies (if any of them!) should be applied to social governance. But I submit that if you are running a network, and you plan to make money doing so, that you probably want to exert some fascism - to be your network's fascist dictator. You probably do not want to even risk the potential chaos if just one autoconfiguration client goes off the deep end and starts making trouble for others.
I suspect IP space will be the problem. I can agree that IP space is a problem, but I doubt very seriously that it will be the problem. Either we reform the system so that IP space is more evenly allocated, or we go to IPv6. Four billion is not going to be enough once China and India really start getting wired. Once IP space gets scarce it gets valuable, and that's when the US government will think of export tariffs on IP space, and other governments will think about splitting the internet. Truth: IPv4 isn't enough addresses, especially if you believe in the utopian ideal that every individual should get at least one globally-routable IP address to themselves, and at best should get one globally-routable IP address for each device they own (all computers, printers, refrigerator, pda, watch, ...). Yes, this is why IPv6 exists, and if implemented it would acheive that ideal. But using IPv6 at this time is...problematic.
False: The IPv4 allocation tip towards US institutions constitutes some kind of 'unfair advantage' in the US' favor. This is simple: Gross US allocations were made at a time when allocation policy was open, when the Internet was just beginning (a sort of land grab if you will). Since that time, allocation policy has changed - you must now justify your need for allocation in order to receive it. That wasn't true back then. You could just say, "Hi, I'm, say, a representative of amateur radio operators. We'd like some addresses to experiment with packet radio. Give me a Class A. Thanks. Bye." and InterNIC would (did!) do it, if they thought you were being genuine. It was a kind of "honor system", that people would only ask for as many addresses as they perceived they would ultimately need. And you can imagine, people perceived they needed a great deal (not always out of greed, but sometimes out of not wanting to pollute the global routing table). The practice of justification today means a well documented algorithm called slow start. You start with a small address allocation (a /21 or so), and you must show that you have consumed more than half of it in order to receive another allocation, or to increase the size of that allocation. Your NIC will reserve the covering /20 for you, so you don't have to renumber to recieve a larger single prefix. If it's still available when you ask for more space, it's assigned. If you then need a /19, that's assigned as a different prefix again in a covering /18, so on, so forth.
The Bottom Line: Non-US address allocations are small not because the US is favoring itself, but rather because these countries cannot justify a need for the gross amounts of space that were allocated in times long past.