[arin-ppml] IPv4 Depletion as an ARIN policy concern

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Lee Howard wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----
> 
>> From: William Herrin <bill at herrin.us>
>> To: "arin-ppml at arin.net" <arin-ppml at arin.net>
>> Sent: Fri, October 30, 2009 2:07:32 PM
>> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] IPv4 Depletion as an ARIN policy concern
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Lee Howard wrote:
>>> I agree, 6to4 is in many cases poorly implemented, as are many of the
>>> other tunnel solutions.  Google's response is to return AAAAs only if
>>> they have pretty high confidence that the client will have native IPv6.
>> Hi Lee,
>>
>> That's an option I look forward to seeing in the bind9 documentation.
>> But while that helps me, it does little for the plethora of server
>> operators who don't host their own DNS and have only weak control over
>> the folks who do.
> 
> Many of them also don't host their own web servers, so the hosting company
> will handle the migration.
> 
>>> Right.  If you don't have IPv6 connectivity, then you can't connect via
>>> IPv6.  This is not unique to IPv6.  I should have included a Step 0: get
>>> good IPv6 transit.
>> Rhetorical question: is it presently possible to get "good" IPv6
>> transit for the same standard of "good" as is available for IPv4
>> transit? The answer, of course, is no.
>>
>> Should IPv6 transport quality ever reach parity with IPv4 transit
>> quality then naturally my objections would fade. But declaring it "as
>> good" doesn't make it so and right now it isn't even close enough for
>> the difference to be subtle.
> 
> Sounds like there may be some dollars to be waived under the noses
> of some transit providers.  "Give me production-grade IPv6 transit
> or my IPv6 bits go elsewhere."
> 
> 
>> At any rate, I'm not trying to argue with you. I'm just explaining
>> some of the reasons why I stopped my IPv6 deployment work after the
>> "experimental, figure out how this thing actually works and take it
>> for a test drive" phase.
> 
> You know, if you have plans for how to implement IPv6 when you
> think it's safe, that's pretty good.  I wish you would help with the 
> things that cause you concern (talk to your transit providers, and 
> use the AAAA-for-IPv6-only feature).  Maybe in six months, 
> conditions will have changed enough for you not to worry.
>  
>>>> Or, of course, if a substantial enough deployment of IPv6-only users
>>>> goes forward despite my own reluctance.
>>> Or maybe if your servers run an app that doesn't like multiple layers
>>> of NAT?
>> My services are NAT-tolerant. Long since passed the point where
>> systems that don't play well with NAT can be considered reliable.
> 
> Sure, everything can hack around home gateway NAT, but some of
> those hacks assume only a single layer.  Question born of ignorance:
> can you track unique web views if thousands of users are behind a
> single IPv4 address?  It might not be an issue for your servers, but
> many websites use that as their primary metric for selling ads, don't
> they?
> 

You can't.  It's also difficult to impossible to discover click
fraud from small operators or from organized crime that create trojan
programs that infect computers - the typical scenario is spurious
redirects to a web browser on an infected computer so the user of
the web browser is generating the clicks.

But, it doesn't matter much since the actual advertisers don't generally
contract with the web hosters - they contract with advertiser networks
(Google AdWords, etc.) who do the actual contracting with the websites,
and who also determine if the clicks are valid or not.  The advertiser
networks consider their logic for detecting click validity to be
proprietary, so at this point its basically impossible to know if
they are counting multiple clicks behind the same NAT device as
separate clicks or not.

In my experience, though, click-counts are mainly used by advertisers
as a way of attempting to beat the price down for advertising, no
serious advertiser pays a lot of attention to them.  Advertisers look
at their own revenue stream and if they spend money with an advertising
network like Google Adwords and they don't see a revenue increase, they
stop buying advertising.  Advertisers who want body counts use promotion
codes or printable coupons to get that.  Typically, the majority
of advertisers will see an increase once they start paying for
advertising, and that's all the advertising networks care about
anyway.

Ted