[rixed]

Part of me consider HTTP/3 as an application protocol and disagree with this. This is not a problem for HTTP to solve but a problem for the routing protocol to solve. Is it desirable to reinvent a routing protocol at the application layer, so that we can use it as another transport protocol and so on? Shouldn't we be using a single, unique 128bit address for every device regardless of which physical network it is attached to, by now? This is not a technological limitation: If the same operator would administer both local wifi and long distance GSM then of course you would not loose your IP, as you do not lose it when you hop from one GSM antenna to the next.

...and part of me think HTTP/3 could be that universal transport protocol that could eventually solve this problem, and then I agree.

[labawi]

I agree it would be appropriate to solve roaming on a lower layer, so any application can roam.

However, the solution should not and cannot be a global routing table. Aside from privacy issues, routing tables are very expensive. It needs to be decentralized, done on or at least near the endpoints, similar to programs like mosh, wireguard etc. Though there are certain security and privacy trade-offs in mentioned protocols that may not be appropriate.

[ATsch]

Yes, this shouldn't be done at the application layer. This is why it's done in QUIC, which is layer 4.5-ish. HTTP/3 runs on top of that.

The "flat address space" idea however is completely ridiculous. That would mean every node on the internet keeping track of the path to every singe other node. This is what ethernet does and it barely scales to ten or so thousand nodes. Routers are already struggling hard with the 700k table entries we have for the IPv4 internet. To the point where providers actually wrap IP packets inside of simpler protocols once they enter the network.

We need some kind of hierarchical addressing that expresses the location of a node in the network. We know this works. We just need the layers above not to rely on those addresses staying constant.

[DarkWiiPlayer]

> The "flat address space" idea however is completely ridiculous. That would mean every node on the internet keeping track of the path to every singe other node. This is what ethernet does and it barely scales to ten or so thousand nodes. Routers are already struggling hard with the 700k table entries we have for the IPv4 internet. To the point where providers actually wrap IP packets inside of simpler protocols once they enter the network.

If anything, we need a more hierarchical structure, with stricter separations by, e.g. Continent/Country/Province and possibly down to street or even house level, so routers can more easily just throw the data in the right general direction. Note the obvious privacy problem there.

[mcguire]

Each Ethernet interface has a unique address; using them is widely regarded as a privacy violation.

[ATsch]

That can be solved, but more importantly, Ethernet can not scale beyond 10k or so nodes because the addresses are meaningless and there's no way to tell what the next hop for an address you've never seen before should be beyond just sending it everywhere and hoping for the best. There's also no way to prevent spoofing, which would be a huge nuisance.