[governance] IPv4, R.I.P.: Europe hits old internet address limits

Lee W McKnight lmcknigh at syr.edu
Mon Sep 17 08:42:05 EDT 2012


Sala, Walid,

Good to open another discussion, now that we've got the future of ICANN as a free agent all figured out. (Right Parminder? ; ).

My views are that IPv6 though a relatively cooked 16 year old technology, is also still a pain in the...to get up and going even for the net guru types.
Which is another way of saying it is not ready for primetime/for every average net user to self-configure for their local lane on the Internet.

But it is already the baseline for the Internet of Things, so v6 addresses as identifiers of things on the net will be the default for a lot of - things.
And there are many more billions of things than people, who are a minority already on the net. So my prediction is the machines will be the early adopters and we humans will be the later adopters. People will rely on IPv4 and NATs until there is a tipping point/x% of human net users directly reachable on IPv6.  What that number is...well maybe someone has a good model now, but all the early IPv6 adoption forecasts way way way underestimated the complexity and challenges of upgrading a global net. Except mine, since back at y2k time 13 years ago I was saying - the upgrade to IPv6 was going to be a bigger headache. : )  Lots of net engineers have consumed lots of aspirin since then confirming I was right.

Still, from the code perspective, IPv6 is not that complicated - we are after all mainly talking about having a bigger address space. Still, remember also IPv6 was basically developed early-mid-90s. Which is a reminder also of the decades of genius tinkering that got us to where we are on the IPv4 Internet, since its ~1981 initial address block allocations.

Therefore, my forecast is for a heterogeneous messy mish-mash of IPv4 and IPv6 networks interconnected at lots of dual-stack points; with legacy IPv4 and NATs living on for quite some time.

Until...that tipping point.

Lee







________________________________
From: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] on behalf of Salanieta T. Tamanikaiwaimaro [salanieta.tamanikaiwaimaro at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 8:02 AM
To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org
Subject: Re: [governance] IPv4, R.I.P.: Europe hits old internet address limits

Hi Walid,

Your students raised a very important question and one that the world is still trying to answer.  If the estimation that there will be somewhere around 3 billion users by 2016 and that judging from current internet traffic, volume will continue to increase in days to come, we wonder why the transitioning phase across the world is still slow. I have a few questions for discussion

NATs
Network Address Translators (NATs) were meant to be short term "temporary solutions" whilst working out "complex far reaching solutions" [see: Egevang, K., and P. Francis, "The IP Network Address Translator (NAT)," RFC 1631<ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1631.txt>, May 1994. and Huston, G, "Anatomy: A Look Inside Network Address Translators". Huston talks about the advantages and disadvantages of NATs as he discusses its anatomy at length.


Questions

  1.  Why are carriers  generally resistant to transitioning to IPv6 and prefer to deal with address shortages through NATs?
  2.  Is there a possibility that Carriers who in the advent of the Internet have been losing revenue (preference for VOIP over traditional telephony, mobile substitution etc) and have found that a growing revenue pool in content? [What are the possible drivers behind the ETNO?]
  3.  Is there are possibility that with IPv4 addresses, carriers know exactly what IPv4 addresses are doing, behaving and can "sell" (without our express permission) this information to Advertisers? [Imagine the Privacy issues - Australia, UK and France have called on Google to completely destroy their data or investigate its contents, see:  http://www.itnews.com.au/News/311216,privacy-commissioner-orders-google-to-destroy-data.aspx]; In the US, Google was recently fined US $22.5million for Apple Safari Tracking, this was a Privacy Settlement and the largest US FTC Penalty ever for violation of a Commission Order, see:  http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/09/google-ftc-safari-tracking-22-5-million-fine/
  4.   Are Network Operators and Content Providers fearful of the WCIT because they could potentially lose traditional revenues?

Some Interesting Readings

  *    Network Service Models and the Internet, his views published on his website this month, see:  http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-09/telecommsandip.html
  *   On the Content economy, his views published on his website in 2001, see: http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2001-06/2001-06-content.html
  *   On Carriage v Content, his views published on his website in July, 2012, see: http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-07/carriagevcontent.html. He talks briefly about ITRs and ETNO proposal in relation to the ITRs
  *   Anatomy: A Look Inside Network Address Translators, see:  http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_7-3/anatomy.html
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