[ppml] Soliciting comments: IPv4 to IPv6 fast migration

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: wherrin at gmail.com [mailto:wherrin at gmail.com]On Behalf Of William
>Herrin
>Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 3:42 PM
>To: Ted Mittelstaedt
>Cc: ARIN Address Policy
>Subject: Re: [ppml] Soliciting comments: IPv4 to IPv6 fast migration
>
>
>On 7/24/07, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at ipinc.net> wrote:
>> >3. Legacy IPv4 registrants don't pay their fair share.
>>
>> You know, William,
>>
>>   I and many others have raised this payment issue repeatedly.  [...]
>>   Frankly, I think it is a lost cause.
>
>Ted,
>
>As a small proprieter I hold a legacy /23 down in the swamp. As the
>infrastructure manager for a multimillion dollar organization, I hold
>a recently registered /22.  As the former engineering lead at an ISP,
>I held both two legacy /18s and an ARIN /19. I've grappled with the
>issue from all three perspectives.
>
>When I wrote this proposal, I asked myelf (among other things): as a
>legacy holder, what would entice me to buy in to the ARIN process
>without greatly offending me as either the recent end-user or the ISP?
>This is what I came up with.
>
>
>Do you or Owen have any comments about the proposal itself?
>For/against/indifferent?
>
>http://bill.herrin.us/arin-policy-proposal-6to4.html


Yes.  My comment is that there is nothing that can be done in policy to
hasten IPv6 adoption and hasten IPv4 abandonment.  Even immediately
levying separate fees - that is, creating a financial incentive in the
fees to abandon IPv4 space "early" - won't do it.  Not because of an
inherent problem with policy.  But because the community does not have
the balls to allow it to happen.

I threfore oppose any weakening of the requirement for legacy holders
to go through the same RSA procedure everyone else has to go through to
obtain IPv6 addressing.

My feeling to be perfectly honest is the Internet community is technically
advanced but business and politically extremely immature.  Most of them are
so incredibly worried that someone is going to come along and tell them what
to do, that they are opposing everything that has any scrap or hint of
appointing a strong central leadership that will force change.

Other industries do not have this problem.  THe banking industry for example
took care of cleaning house when the thrifts all started failing by creating
the RTC which broke a huge number of hearts and spurred hundreds of
lawsuits.
The banks knew that would happen but they wern't afraid of pissing off a few
lawyers.  It so happened that in some cases the lawsuits did, in fact, win -
because the plaintiffs were in fact right.  But it made no difference
because
by the time the wins happened, the thrift industry was gone and even the
judges that awarded the wins realized you cannot put Humpty Dumpty back
together, and the wins merely resulted in transferring money around - they
did not result in thrifts like Benj Franklin coming back into business.

If the Internet community had balls, they would appoint a Czar and tell all
IPv4 holders they had until 2010 to switch to IPv6 and pay the fees, to hell
with your legacy status.  In 2010 they would aggressivly block IPv4 all over
the
Internet.  In 2012, everyone would have switched to IPv6 and you would have
4 or 5 large legacy holders in court, suing ARIN/IANA/everyone claiming they
were illegally forced to submit to IPv6.  The courts would find in their
favor
sometime in year 2020 by which time IPv6 would be so entrenched and IPv4 so
dead, that the wins would have no meaning whatsoever.  And no court would
go against the rest of the world and try ordering the Internet to stop
blocking IPv4 so the legacy holders could get their free ride for a few more
years.  And even if one did the rest of the world would ignore it with the
result that a tiny chunk of the Internet would revert to IPv4 and become
useless.

But, the Internet community is too short sighted to understand that since
they
are unwilling to do this, and force the issue, that if ignoring the problem
ever causes a serious problem on the Internet, the worlds governments will
simply come in and take over and do it for them.  And if that happens once
the
governments get involved they will never leave.  There is a term for that it
is called a Pyrric victory.

Ted