[Chapter-delegates] ISOC Briefing Papers on IPv6

[Marcin Cieslak]

Anne Lord wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> This is just a friendly reminder that the next briefing paper discussion
> will be held on 26th August at UTC 10.30 and UTC 20.00 (subject to a
> quorum of 5 chapter attendees for each call).
> The papers are on IPv6, specifically:
> 
> a) IPv6 deployment: State of play and the way forward:
> http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/ipv6-way-forward.pdf
> 
> b) IPv6: Why and how Governments should be involved:
> http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/docs/ipv6-government-role.pdf

I am afraid I might not be able to join the conference, therefore I put
my first thoughts here, from the point of view of a consultant who
sometimes tries to "sell" the idea of IPv6 to my customers:

1. An issue with IPv6 Address Aggregation

During a session on IPv6 with IP community in Poland organized by
national telecommunications regulator one major issue popped up: it's
the portability of smaller IPv6 spaces in spite of aggregation. I think
this is a real problem in the IPv6 take-up - aggregation of addressing
space that will preclude some players (for example large internet
portals and content providers) to quickly change their upstream
providers, as this is possible now with a small PI (Provider
Independent) space (even /24). I don't know what's the current status of
IETF work on this and I'd like to find out.

2. We should put more stress on benefits of NAT-free environment.

- I think there are some applications already there that most of the
people know. One is VoIP (but everyone uses Skype, so who cares) and
gaming (and this is causing some pain, salvaged with UPnP). Gaming
recently takes up also as the instant messaging and voice service, that
was demonstrated recently as the means of avoiding Internet censorship
in some countries.

- Another (although niche) example is distributed software revision
control used to maintain the computer source code for programmers (with
new models exhibited by git, mercurial, darcs and others) where it's a
real peer-to-peer mesh of developers machines without any need for
version control servers. This has been recently a real hit and many (if
not most) of the open-source projects have already adopted them. I would
definitely watch this movement since open source development in my
opinion is the early adopter of any Internet technology. We wouldn't
have Wikipedia for example if programmers didn't start to put their
notes on a quickly-editable Wiki site. The benefits of reaching any
device directly are obvious and no kind of NAT workaround like
Application Level Gateway or port redirection is likely to work
effectively.

- Once we have admitted mistake and realized that a dual-stack approach
won't take us anywhere I think we should start advocating use of IPv6
instead of the RFC1918 behind NATs. I think this is a subject of a
recent IETF work and is definitely worth watching. That's more or less
the way free.fr deployed IPv6 in their infrastructure for customers.
This the reason why Comcast needs to move (not enough RFC1918 space).
I think that also many corporations may solve their extranet and access
segmentation woes with moving into globally-unique IPv6 internally
(barring crappy applications). I was personally trapped in this problem
many times trying to coordinate "pseudo-global" RFC 1918 deployments of
neighboring corporations ("oh, you have 10/8 too? So let's put a small
172.16.0.0 network between us and let's double-NAT.").

- Let's have a look at the Google Wave. There is no reason why this
technology could not break free from the client-server XMPP model and
move onto peer-to-peer exchange using something like SIP or whatever. We
just shouldn't be afraid to say the "dirty (p2p) word". I think there is
tremendous potential in those kind of interactions (regardless whether
waves will catch on or not).

3. Security

Lots of people say that using publicly-reachable addresses is a threat
to security. The false sense of security given by NAT has grown deeply
into network manager's mindsets. I usually keep saying that addressing
and routing are not security and too complicated schemes usually
backfire with security holes resulting from misconfiguration. A quick
way to demonstrate this are all client-related attacks especially on web
browsers or via email spam. Botnets operate fine mostly behind NATs, too.

I spoke recently with a top-level technical executive of a huge media
company that was afraid that some provider is going to use public IP
addresses to multicast some multimedia content to them. I had to explain
that there's nothing wrong in using public IP addresses for
communication. (Unfortunately this was about IPv4, but maybe I will get
another call from him someday).

4. Awareness

I seriously think we should run TV ads on IPv6. I have some ideas if
needed :) I looked recently on YouTube and the only cool thing I could
find was this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0

Nice, but this is not enough.

I was recently amazed that middle-level broadband Internet marketing
staff at one company didn't have a clue what an IPv6 is! They are
actually preparing itself to deploy an infrastructure that could
potentially support IPv6 from day one and they  didn't even know they
could make an IPv6 offering part of the product.

The reason for this is probably because IPv6 is still being considered
as the toy for techs and it hardly ever leaves the data center basement.

5. Government involvement

If everything else fails, call the government :) I must admit I am
really ambivalent on this. On one hand, it's the government that created
and funded ARPA and the rest is history. One the other hand, it all
looks all-too-similar to the OSI protocols case. I am having too much
doubts and trouble on the government possibly regulating IP (call it
NGN) networks. Sure, the paper does not call for regulation, but some
gentle methods, but at least in Europe we are in the middle of the
process for the governments to "crack down" on the evil on the Internet.
It's hard time to explain that Internet does belong neither to telco nor
media regulation.

I would say that the IPv6 problem is within marketing department and not
public policy.

-- 
              << Marcin Cieslak // saper at saper.info >>

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