Quo Vadis IPv6 - Was: Re: [governance] IPv4 - IPv6 incompatiblity (was Re: Towards Singapore)

Fri Jun 17 01:57:32 EDT 2011

Hi All

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

    (Quote starts)

    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.

    So we have to evolving forces:

       A) the desire of gov'ts and others to create and regulate choke
    points into/out-from their chunks of the net

       B) the the consumer-eye view of the net as a platform for
    applications

    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.

(quote from Karl's email ends)

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.

"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. "

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.

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.

parminder

On Friday 17 June 2011 04:32 AM, Karl Auerbach wrote:
> On 06/16/2011 02:30 AM, Izumi AIZU wrote:
>> Or, what was the biggest reason/rationale not to make IPv6 compatible
>> with IPv4....
>
> IPv6 had a somewhat difficult birth back in the early 1990's.
>
> 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.
>
> It was recognized back then that there were several issues in play; 
> the address size was recognized as but one issue among many.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> So we have to evolving forces:
>
>   A) the desire of gov'ts and others to create and regulate choke 
> points into/out-from their chunks of the net
>
>   B) the the consumer-eye view of the net as a platform for applications
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> (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.)
>
> 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.
>
> Internet lumps have some attractive properties, at least in the eyes 
> of some:
>
>   - 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.)
>
>   - 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.
>
>   - 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.
>
>   - Application level gateways between lumps do not require 
> super-NATs, so the 64K limit on TCP/UDP port number issues do not arise.
>
> This not necessarily an attractive view of the future, but it is 
> possible and, I believe, likely.
>
> 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.
>
>     --karl--
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