[arin-ppml] ARIN's Authority - One view (was: Re: LRSA concerns)

[William Herrin]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Howard, W. Lee
<Lee.Howard at stanleyassociates.com> wrote:
> What can we do to ease the transition to IPv6?

Lee,

Not much. There are three key obstacles to IPv6 deployment:

1. In a down economy, deploying and maintaining both IPv6 and IPv4
costs noticeably more money than just IPv4 and it is not practical (at
an individual or org-by-org level) to discontinue the IPv4 costs after
deploying IPv6. Worse, it has the costliest of costs: manpower from
your top technical people diverted from other tasks. Hence any
organization which deploys IPv6 is economically disadvantaged versus
those competitors who don't.

2. Some damn fools at the IETF recommended that applications which
support IPv6 should use it in preference to IPv4 when available.
Nearly all of the application developers have followed that
bone-headed recommendation. So as soon as you turn IPv6 on in your
network, -everything- in your network tries to use it first and only
falls back to IPv4 if IPv6 doesn't work. Since that detection and
fallback process is considerably less than perfect, the net result is
an instant drop in overall system reliability when you deploy IPv6
(since the v6 parts of both your software and the network overall are
less well tested), making IPv6 deployment undesirable.

3. Based in part on the recommendations from the same knuckleheads in
#2, the registries (including ARIN) determined that a mid-90's style
Internet land rush would undesirably generate the same
legacy-registrant problems in IPv6 that they have with IPv4. So,
policy was set such that we would not have a land rush. Hence no rush
to deploy IPv6.


Of these, only #3 is addressable within ARIN's bailiwick. Since last
year, ARIN has at least removed the incentives for folks to work
against IPv6 deployment (ALL present registrants now qualify for a
direct IPv6 assignment or allocation). However, without a land rush
folks will tend to deploy needs-justified resources only as they need
them. For better or for worse, nobody needs IPv6; they need more IPv4.
IPv6 functions as a substitute about as effectively as tap water at a
bar.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com bill at herrin.us
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