[ih] Internet without entrenched factions?

[Brian E Carpenter]

I was wondering after this conversation about the history of IETF effort on IPv6. As I suggested, it seems to have been about 10% of IETF output over a number of years. I have now plotted the numbers. The graph is at https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/IPv6-RFCs.png.

It shows how many IPv6-related RFCs were published per year since 1995 (top curve) and how many of those were specifically about IPv4/IPv6 coexistence (bottom curve).

The data were extracted algorithmically from the RFC index, so should be treated as approximate. The code is here if anyone cares: https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/RFC6stats.py

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 15-May-26 16:57, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 15-May-26 05:49, John Gilmore wrote:
>> Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think most people have accepted the reality that v4 and v6
>>> will coexist for many years to come. But many of us think that
>>> if IPv4 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it.
>>
>> Brian, I seriously respect your work on IPv6.  You and the v6 pioneers
>> have saved the Internet from its success disaster of address exhaustion.
>> But here you are recommending a double standard:
>>
>>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_standard
>>
>> If IPv6 ain't broke, we shouldn't fix it either.
>>
>> You're not suggesting that IPv6 is broken, nor am I.  Yet IPv6 continues
>> to be fixed.
> 
> Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed, and it's one that the
> ROAD group flagged in 1992 [RFC1380] and the IRTF Routing Research Group flagged
> in 2011 [RFC6115] and the ipv6ops WG is still discussing today. We don't know how to
> support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens of millions of small
> and medium enterprises. CIDR and BGP4 scale pretty well, but not for tens of millions
> of multihomed sites. And because the speed of light is invariant under Moore's Law,
> this does not appear to be a problem that can be solved by attaching more powerful
> rockets to a terrestrial pig.
> 
> Apart from that, I would have to do a lot of work to classify which of those IPv6
> related drafts are fixes to IPv6, which are about IPv4/IPv6 coexistence, and which
> are evolution.
> 
> What I can tell you is that the rate of IPv6-related RFCs per kiloRFC peaked a
> few years ago, in the RFC 6000-6999 series (16 on coexistence, 86 on IPv6 alone,
> or about 10% of the IETF's output).
> 
> In the current RFC9000-9999 series, which is almost done, we so far have
> 4 on coexistence, 49 on IPv6 as such. Or, about 5% of the IETF's output.
> 
>      Brian
> 
>>
>> IPv6 continues to be fixed by IETF -- and IPv4 doesn't.
>>
>> Neither one is broken.
>>
>> Both should evolve -- are evolving.  But not at IETF.
> 
> 
>>
>> 	John
>>