Brian E Carpenter <[email protected]> wrote: > The mission is "to make the Internet work better" and > affecting the sales value of 32 bit numbers is not really the same > thing, especially since 128 bit numbers are already much cheaper.
If 128-bit numbers were a fungible replacement for 32-bit numbers, telling people to just get cheap 128-bit ones would work; but they aren't. As you point out in their prices, the public values the 32-bit ones much more than they value the 128-bit ones. IPv6 doesn't need any of our proposed improvements, since many of them are historical artifacts of IPv4's evolution that were never carried over to IPv6. For example, IPv6 has a single loopback address, not 16 million of them; and no broadcast addresses, not two per subnet. Making improvements to IPv4 that IPv6 doesn't need is not a crime. We have no wish to stop or slow the deployment of IPv6. IPv4 and IPv6 are not in opposition; they are complementary. Both exist on the Internet today, have coexisted for decades, and will likely continue to coexist for decades. Much of today's demand for IPv4 space is driven by organizations that have already adopted IPv6 intensively and which systematically offer dual-stack services. They are friends, not foes, of IPv6 deployment. As Mueller and Kuerbis said in 2019 in an ICANN-funded report, "Even if they have deployed IPv6, growing networks must continue to acquire scarce, increasingly expensive IPv4 addresses to interconnect with the rest of the Internet. Deploying IPv6 does not immediately end the problem of IPv4 address exhaustion." See: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2019/02/20/report-on-ipv6-get-ready-for-a-mixed-internet-world/ Andrew Sullivan <[email protected]> wrote: > I think I recalled an (int area?) meeting something like a decade ago > where there was a pretty strong sense of consensus that the right > thing for the IETF to do is to stop fiddling with IPv4 and to make the > path to v6 easier. As we heard from Eliot Lear, this wasn't how the 2008 decision was made regarding 240/4 (the Class E address block). But if the consensus at some point did go there, it would have been a false choice, because "[keep] fiddling with IPv4" and "make the path to v6 easier" aren't strict alternatives or substitutes at all. If treated as two separate suggestions ("stop fiddling with IPv4" and "make the path to v6 easier"), each may have merit; but the connection between them is not simple or obvious. The theory behind "stop fiddling with IPv4 and make the path to v6 easier" seems to be that if IETF stopped making any improvements to IPv4, then users would respond by spending all their efforts on IPv6. In actuality, users have thousands of other things that they can spend their efforts on besides either IPv4 and IPv6. If they don't spend time and money following IETF's fiddling with IPv4 (because IETF stopped fiddling with IPv4), they might instead add features to their product. They might pay higher dividends to their stockholders. They might write better manuals. They might try to corner a market. They might acquire another company. They might do academic research. They might design and deploy NAT in their network. They might go home and watch TV. Oh yes, and they might work on IPv6! But merely saying "No more improvements will happen to IPv4" will not force them to do any particular one of those things. The two choices presented do not exhaust the space of possibilities, and this is a classic way to fall into a fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma Even if IETF stopped fiddling with IPv4, that didn't stop users from fiddling with IPv4 themselves. Many IPv4 implementations have evolved their "running code" despite the absence of IETF's "rough consensus". Some of our proposals attempt to form a consensus informed by these existing implementions. We think that's better than each implementation going off in different directions because they haven't found a forum in which discussions of IPv4 evolution will be taken seriously. IETF's (and intarea's) area of responsibility is the stewardship of the IP protocol suite, certainly including the original one, IPv4. If IETF or intarea had really decided to stop all future work on the standards that carry the majority of the world's Internet traffic, that would have been a drastic shift for the organization. For that to have happened without even publishing an RFC documenting the decision would have been highly unusual. Is there such an RFC? Whether IETF should actually "fiddle with IPv4" is a decision that should be made on the merits of each proposed fiddle, as with every other protocol proposal at IETF. To the extent that IETF has or had a policy of "stop fiddling with IPv4", a decade+ of this did not cause IPv6 to supplant IPv4. So if any such policy existed, it should be re-examined based on its results in the real world. Finally, if intarea or IETF knows a way to "make the path to v6 easier", we welcome such work and recommend approving it. And yet, the community has looked in vain so far for an IPv6 silver bullet that would obviate the ongoing demand for IPv4 address space. That's why we worked on easy ways to increase the supply rather than on reducing the demand. John Gilmore & Seth David Schoen _______________________________________________ Int-area mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/int-area
