[TChris]

Conflicting IP addresses won't matter if they have a completely separate net. Other than that, we're talking IP address assignment as is currently done by ARIN (us), RIPE (Europe), plus ones for Africa, Asia and Latin America, all of whom assign IP blocks in their own geographic area. IIRC, there is even political wrangling over that, since we have the bulk of them (duh, we invented it), but that should go away with IPv6.

It still seems to me that IPv6 is unnecessary. If large blocks of "legal" IPs weren't horded by companies, my employer being one of them, for internal networks, then there should be plenty of IPv4 addresses available. Technologies like NAT and dynamic addressing (DHCP) should make IPv4 work just fine for a long, long time.

[antiRepublicrat]

It still seems to me that IPv6 is unnecessary.

IPv6 has a lot more useful features than just address space, but, yes, there's a lot of wasted space in the current IP handling. Of course, NAT (which was a hack for the limit on IPv4 addresses, and causes problems of its own) would be completely unneccessary with IPv6. We'd have a lot left over even if half of the space was wasted, the Earth's population quadrupled and each person was using 50,000 addresses.