Folks, [consolidated answers]

Hank Nussbacher wrote: So don't assign wealth.

I never did.

Use some number that has direct influence on IPv6 usage. Among the possibilities: - # of computer per capita

This would definitely have a direct bearing on IPv6 usage, but is subject to change a lot more rapidly than population. In China for example, I have seen some projections that say the number of connected computers per capita will be multiplied by 100 in the next 10 years. Compare this with the growth of the Chinese population. I don't remember you giving specific reasons why allocation based on population is bad.

Clive D.W. Feather wrote: Either population or land area is about the best indicator you're going to get of *eventual* *long-term* demand.

I agree. I picked population because IPv6 usage is tied to human activity. The fact of the matter is that unless there are tremendous changes I don't see a lot of human activity in deserts, oceans and ice caps.

...

Andre Oppermann wrote: Can anyone tell me why an IP address should be geograhically significant in this way? Doesn't this open a can of worms of potential abuse all over the place?

Gert Doering wrote: One motivation I can see for it is to permit more-specific announcements inside a region (because it's interesting to find "the shortest way" to the destination network) but to summarize the routing information "from the outside". For us, as a small german ISP, it's not really important who is hooked up where in the US or in the AP region - so a summary route "all this stuff is in the US, send this to our upstream" (simplified) is likely to suit us fine.

I agree and I will add to this that even if you don't have the more-specific announcements the geography could be used to take an educated guess at traffic engineering. Example: - You buy transit from to bigger ISPs, A and B. ISP A has dark fiber all over the place but not too much L3 infrastructure and they backhaul your circuit to Paris which is their main hub. You know that ISP B has a large number of peers in an IXP in Germany where lots of ISPs also peer. - If you have no specific route to a prefix, it makes sense to send all traffic to German prefixes to ISP B, because the likeliness of ISP B having a shorter connection is greater.

But then, *if* we decide to do some kind of distribution on the geographic level, we need to setup "chunks" in advance (to avoid having more than one high-level prefix per "region"). So this scheme should take future development into account - and who are we to say that a country X "will always be poor and under-developed"?

Agree.

Leo Vegoda wrote: It is worth noting that the current IPv6 policy is not restricted to allocating /32s. LIRs moving large numbers of IPv4 customers to IPv6 can receive shorter prefixes: [..] For this reason, it probably makes sense to take account of existing IPv4 usage when considering this issue.

It does indeed. Michel.