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<font face="sans-serif">Hi All<br>
<br>
Karl provide a concise description of what is happening and what
went wrong with the internet. This analysis is best represented in
the following paragraph<br>
<br>
</font>
<blockquote>(Quote starts) <br>
<br>
In addition users of the net no longer view the internet as a
vehicle for the transport of packets from one IP address to
another. Rather users today see the internet as a bag of
applications. They don't care how the engines underneath work as
long as the applications work. In other words, users don't care
about the end-to-end principle.
<br>
<br>
So we have to evolving forces:
<br>
<br>
A) the desire of gov'ts and others to create and regulate choke
points into/out-from their chunks of the net
<br>
<br>
B) the the consumer-eye view of the net as a platform for
applications
<br>
<br>
These two forces combine to allow the net to evolve in a direction
many of us do not like to think about - a kind of soft
fragmentation that I call the "lumpy" internet.
<br>
</blockquote>
<font face="sans-serif">(quote from Karl's email ends)<br>
<br>
Apart of understanding what is happening, we are a political
advocacy need to figure out 'what can and should be done about
it'. And in this respect the following part of Karl's email is
very instructive. <br>
<br>
"</font>It would be sad indeed, from the point of civil liberties
and expression, to kiss goodbye to the end-to-end principle. But
that loss is as much due to users who view the network as
applications as to any of the other forces - attractive toys often
distract us from social values.
"<br>
<br>
Is it not something new that 'individual users' are acting in this
way, it is a way they or we always/ mostly behave. Not everything
can be given the right direction and, when needed. corrected by
individual users themselves acting independently (the techno-liberal
view) or consumers voting through their dollars (the neo-liberal
view). This also shows the strong overlaps of the techno-liberal and
neo-liberal views in their practical outcome and impact, which in
this case, for instance, is that we have nearly lost out on
end-to-end principle, and the chances of building the Internet as
really an egalitarian platform and force, which was the global
society's hope for quite some time. <br>
<br>
We need collective/political processes, how much ever a
techno-liberal, instinctively hates the very term, to guide our
soceities in the direction we want it to go. The dream that the new
technology paradigm will by itself do it for us is fast evaporating,
and it is good time that we pulled our heads out of the proverbial
sand. It is time that we, as a prime civil society group in the
global IG arena, tries to come up with a sound political vision -
both substantive and institutional - for how the Internet should
serve the highest and most noble causes or social values that we
espouse, or, in default, one will have to say, which we think we
espouse. <br>
<br>
<br>
parminder<font face="sans-serif"><br>
<br>
</font><br>
On Friday 17 June 2011 04:32 AM, Karl Auerbach wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4DFA8B78.7090901@cavebear.com" type="cite">On
06/16/2011 02:30 AM, Izumi AIZU wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Or, what was the biggest reason/rationale
not to make IPv6 compatible
<br>
with IPv4....
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
IPv6 had a somewhat difficult birth back in the early 1990's.
<br>
<br>
There were actually several proposals - my own favorite was a
thing called TUBA, which was an adaptation of the ISO/OSI
connectionless network layer. There were several aspects that
were interesting, and it had an address that was expansible up to
160bits. The hostility towards ISO/OSI is still strong today -
much to the detriment of the internet - and was much stronger back
then. So TUBA sank beneath the IETF's waves.
<br>
<br>
It was recognized back then that there were several issues in
play; the address size was recognized as but one issue among many.
<br>
<br>
The format of the address was another - the variable size of the
TUBA "NSAP" scared people who built routers because of the
overhead of parsing a flexible address format.
<br>
<br>
Which leads to the big issue that IPv6 never squarely faced - the
issue of how routing information is created, aggregated,
propagated, used, and withdrawn on the net. As a general rule the
net's routing infrastructure needs to be able to propagate route
information faster than the average rate of route change. And
since those days we've learned to be a lot more skeptical about
the authenticity of routing information.
<br>
<br>
Early on there was much talk and though about IPv6 transition -
how things might co-exist, even with intermediated interoperation
of IPv4 and IPv6 devices. But over time the energy to have a
smooth transition withered and left us more with a conversion from
IPv4 to IPv6 rather than a transition - the difference is subtle,
conversion tends to be a more painful hurdle to leap than a
transition.
<br>
<br>
My own personal feeling is that IPv6 is too little and too late,
that it will hit with about the same force as ISO/OSI - which like
IPv6 had the backing of governments (GOSIP) and large companies
(MAP - General Motors, TOP - Boeing).
<br>
<br>
We are here talking on a mailing list in which many of the
discussions are based on a recognition of the increasing desire of
governments, intellectual property protectors, corporations, and
others to stake out territories for them to control.
<br>
<br>
In other words, we here are quite familiar with the fact that
there are many forces that want to carve the internet up into
fiefdoms and draw paywalls or tariff-walls or censorship lines
around their dominions.
<br>
<br>
In addition users of the net no longer view the internet as a
vehicle for the transport of packets from one IP address to
another. Rather users today see the internet as a bag of
applications. They don't care how the engines underneath work as
long as the applications work. In other words, users don't care
about the end-to-end principle.
<br>
<br>
So we have to evolving forces:
<br>
<br>
A) the desire of gov'ts and others to create and regulate choke
points into/out-from their chunks of the net
<br>
<br>
B) the the consumer-eye view of the net as a platform for
applications
<br>
<br>
These two forces combine to allow the net to evolve in a direction
many of us do not like to think about - a kind of soft
fragmentation that I call the "lumpy" internet.
<br>
<br>
Such a lumpy internet would be composed of distinct, but each
fully formed, IPv4 (or IPv6) address spaces. Each lump would have
its own routing infrastructure, own hierarchy, etc. If someone,
like China or Comcast, needed more addresses than IPv4 could
provide, they could create more lumps for themselves, each with a
full 32-bit address space.
<br>
<br>
These lumps would be connected by Application Level Gateways -
things like web proxies. These would act as relays between the
lumps. End-to-end addressing is by names, such as URIs or twitter
tags or whatever seems appropriate.
<br>
<br>
This may seem far fetched, but it is not unlike the way that
mobile phone networks interconnect applications (voice being one
application, texting be another) between competing, even hostile
providers such as AT&T and Verizon.
<br>
<br>
(These ALGs are much like a concept I proposed back in the 1980
and that Cisco revived a couple of years back - they are
essentially the application layer analog to layer 3 IP routers.)
<br>
<br>
Domain names would become contextual - their meaning would depend
on the lump in which they were uttered. However, people don't
like surprises and there would be a natural pressure for the DNS
naming systems of different lumps to construct mechanisms or
clearinghouses to assure a reasonable, but probably not perfect,
degree of consistency, while allowing local/per-lump variations
and extensions. Application level gateways might find that one of
their jobs is mapping out inconsistencies of names between lumps.
<br>
<br>
Internet lumps have some attractive properties, at least in the
eyes of some:
<br>
<br>
- They are "owned" so that the owner, whether that be a country
or a corporation or a religious group, can open contact with the
rest of the world only through guarded portals (i.e. their set of
application gateways.)
<br>
<br>
- Those portals can be taxed, censored, data-mined as desired.
And since application level gateways pull user-data up to the
application layer, there is no need for deep packet inspection
technologies.
<br>
<br>
- Since each lump is in itself a complete IPv4 space, there is
no need for transition to IPv6. Each lump could give itself the
entire 32-bit IPv4 address space, just as today we each re-use the
same chunks of IPv4 private address space behind the NAT's in our
homes.
<br>
<br>
- Application level gateways between lumps do not require
super-NATs, so the 64K limit on TCP/UDP port number issues do not
arise.
<br>
<br>
This not necessarily an attractive view of the future, but it is
possible and, I believe, likely.
<br>
<br>
It would be sad indeed, from the point of civil liberties and
expression, to kiss goodbye to the end-to-end principle. But that
loss is as much due to users who view the network as applications
as to any of the other forces - attractive toys often distract us
from social values.
<br>
<br>
--karl--
<br>
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<br>
</blockquote>
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