Help me understand how making it technically simpler for people to have persistant portable allocations is going to decrease RIB sizes. It's been over a decade since I had to write a BGP regex, but to my uneducated eyes, it looks like the exact opposite is true.
It really feels to me like nobody wants to acknowledge that IP addresses are just the license plate numbers that ISPs issue; that, or they hope that IPv6 is going to magically change that.
What I see you saying is "yeah, well, that's not going to be a problem because very few people are going to bother to ask for portable addresses". But clearly more people are going to ask in a world where it's numerically possible for them to have one than in a world where it isn't.
It depends on the economic (dis)incentives around such an action, and they will be the main determining factor, as opposed to technicalities. Whether it will be much easier with IPv6 than with IPv4 - the time will show.
Much like with the a migration itself - which is a balance of the cost of hinging on the IPv4 only (investing into NATs and support), or investing into IPv6 infra as well as a strategic way forward. I have no material interest in either (gee, FWIW the NAT mess could provide much more billable work:), but having helped non-single digit hundred of people people un-shoot themselves with NATs in the past 10 years, I think IPv6 is cleaner architecturally in the long run - because it is simpler.
But I think we both agree it's a matter of economics. What is simpler and cheaper to use. And the fact that the p2p substrate in the heavily-NATted environment is a dead-on competitive advantage - so no-one is going to play the charity and release their code for the benefit of the community.
It really feels to me like nobody wants to acknowledge that IP addresses are just the license plate numbers that ISPs issue; that, or they hope that IPv6 is going to magically change that.