[governance] User input to Internet architecture work

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

There have been recently on this list a long discussion about IPv6
design and deployment, with questions about the requirments that were
used during the IPv6 design.

Now, IPv6 is an old story, the protocol is designed and implemented
and I don't think it is a good idea to rediscuss it again, specially
from people who have no idea of the engineering issues which were at
stake at this time.

But it does not mean that user input is not important for the design
of a technical architecture. If IPv6 is done, the next generation of
Internet architecture is currently under design and it is still time
to influence it. The requirments for it are, basically, everything
that was left out of IPv6, specially the question of the routing table
growth and management. They are discussed in RFC 4984
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4984.txt), which is a report on a very
interesting workshop about routing and addressing.

Most of the proposed solutions involve the meme of "separation between
the identifier and the locator", described in sections 2.2, 6 and 7.2
of the RFC.

Now, these questions are policy questions, too. As the RFC 4984 says
very well:

   The workshop participants noted that there exist different classes of
   stakeholders in the Internet community who view today's global
   routing system from different angles, and assign different priorities
   to different aspects of the problem set.  The prioritized problem
   statement in this section is the consensus of the participants in
   this workshop, representing primarily large network operators and a
   few router vendors.  It is likely that a different group of
   participants would produce a different list, or with different
   priorities.  For example, freedom to change providers without
   renumbering might make the top of the priority list assembled by a
   workshop of end users and enterprise network operators.

So, it seems there is room for policy shaping here. The problem is
that there is currently no channel for user input to reach the IETF
(and it is not easy to build such a channel, for various reasons, one
of them being the necessity to bar access to various trolls which will
propose snake-oil stuff like chinese IPv9 and so on). Fora like the
IGF never discuss practical things, focusing instead on politician
matters like the number of seats in a board. This is the challenge
that CS should now take.

Otherwise, the Internet will be ruled by the big and wealthy
companies. A recent Internet-draft on the design process of the new
architecture (http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-burness-locid-evaluate)
says it quite bluntly:

      Key players must not be disadvantaged, or they may try to obstruct
      standards or restrict deployment.  A specific aspect of this to
      highlight is how network providers today use policy control.
      Providers are unlikely to support any scheme which make policy
      management more difficult that today.  They are likely to require
      the ability to check that routes are as diverse as possible, to
      chose routes based on cost and performance and to avoid routes
      leaving or entering a specific country or domain.

A vision which one can see as extremely candid or extremely cynical...
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