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

[Paul Wilson]

Parminder,

Has anyone actually demonstrated that "something went wrong with the 
Internet" in this particular regard?

Can you explain exactly what you think has gone wrong?

Thanks,

Paul.




--On 17 June 2011 12:07:40 PM +0530 parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> 
wrote:

>
>
> On Friday 17 June 2011 11:27 AM, parminder wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> And since users no longer care about the end to end principle, the user-
> centric or consumer-centric world-view that almost monopolises IG
> discourse can now safely assume and assert that the end-to-end principle
> is no longer required to be pursued. The lesson for those who think
> 'public interest' is merely the 'simple' sum of individual interests is
> very clear here, and I have heard of lot of IGC members explicitly or
> implicitly stress this view as an important plank of their political
> thinking. Would be eager to hear what they have to say in the light this
> apparent paradox about end to end principle and the Internet. parminder
>
>
>
>
>
> 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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________________________________________________________________________
Paul Wilson, Director-General, APNIC                      <dg at apnic.net>
http://www.apnic.net                                     +61 7 3858 3100

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