Geoff Huston preaches version control

Good to see an Australian story creeping up the rankings at Memeorandum, in this case a Computerworld yarn about IPv6 built around comments by Geoff Huston, ex-Telstra and now APNIC technical guru, generally credited as being one of the forefathers of the Australian part of the Internet.

Despite the respect I have for him, I locked horns with Geoff many a time back when he was at Telstra banging on about ATM over Frame Relay being the saviour of the Internet and other such historical oddities. It does not surprise me that he has decided to go flat-earth on this issue. What does raise my eyebrow is the brazenness of his contention that because ISPs have built business lines around IP scarcity, this should be the way things are forever more. This is a very Telstra way of looking at the world or, in the current vernacular, an orifice-centric view. The availability of IP numbers should not be an orifice. One might have thought that after leaving Telstra and working for a non-profit that Geoff would learn a thing or two about open networks, but I guess a thylacine doesn't lose his stripes.

On the aggregator issue, I happen to know there is an Australian-only news aggregator being built as we speak, which no doubt would have had that CW story front and centre this morning. No, it's not Tinfinger. Watch this space.