[arin-ppml] IPv6 Transition Policy (aka Soft Landing)

[Matthew Petach]

On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 12:34 PM, Chris Grundemann <cgrundemann at gmail.com> wrote:
> Let me offer a general response to all of the great feedback:
>
> The basic idea here is to redefine efficient utilization. The fact is
> that at this point (and for quite some time now) IPv4 addresses that
> are not deployed along with IPv6 addresses are simply not being
> efficiently utilized. Just like assigning a v4/24 to a PTP link is
> wasteful, deploying IPv4 only is wasteful.

I would argue that this is where the market will step in; this is a wonderful
opportunity for Transition Service Providers to help providers who are not
dual stacked get access to the portion of the Internet for which they do not
have direct, native connectivity.

Why use policy to try to shape an outcome that can be achieved through
normal market interplay, creating thousands of jobs in the process?

Deploying IPv4 only creates scarcity; scarcity drives up demand; higher
demand creates market opportunities (so long as we don't overly restrict
them); market opportunities allow new businesses to spring up to fulfill
the need, bringing new jobs into the sector.

Personally, I'm against a soft landing.  We did just fine when faced with
the hard deadline of Y2k; it created thousands of jobs for people working
to get things ready for doomsday.  Let's let the same situation work here;
as people become aware of the dual nature of the new internet, they'll
start clamoring for service providers who can do application gatewaying
for them, between the old and the new, or vice versa.  And given that
80% of the traffic these days is HTTP based, those translation service
providers will have a fairly easy time of it; just set up racks of Apache
Traffic Server boxes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Server) that can
answer and proxy requests from both v4 and v6 on the front-and-back sides,
configure a DNS server that replies to all lookups for the "other" protocol
with the address of the trafficserver farm, and for most of the traffic, the
end site suddenly is able to see both the "old" internet and the "new"
internet.

Let's not try to wrap our heads too much around the idea of "fairness";
the market is driven by imbalances in resource allocation, and it's in
the transfer of unequally distributed resources that money is to be
made.

> Cheers,
> ~Chris
>
> "Those who do not create the future they want must endure the future they get."
> ~Draper L. Kaufman, Jr.

I'm voting to create a nice new internet boom, at least for the next several
years, by providing a wonderful market opportunity.  So, I'd have to say "no"
to the idea of trying to create any more of a soft landing than the
/10 transition
block already does.  I'm aiming to create a future that lets a few more
engineers become millionaires again, rather than endure a future of
ever-smaller crumb-splitting.

Matt