[governance] User input to Internet architecture work

[Carlos Afonso]

A question for the ones engaged in this interesting thread: is there an 
Internet space (a Web site or similar) which is trying to consolidate 
and report regularly on the progress of IPv4->IPv6 transition? I know 
there are real tests being done in several countries, in large networks, 
and occasional ones, all bringing interesting conclusions (and best 
practices), but I have so far not found a space which gives us a vision 
of the whole process -- in my view, a great need for the ones preparing 
to (or fearing to) "migrate".

Please note I am not talking about inner techie spaces, but something a 
journalist or a decision-maker (who is not a network techie) can read 
and understand. There is the IPv6 European Task Force portal 
(www.ipv6tf.org) which does something along the lines I am talking 
about. Is this *the* site people should be visiting?

frt rgds

--c.a.

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> 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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