[[members-discuss] [ncc-announce] RIPE NCC Position On The ITU IPv6 Group]

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1

From: gordon b slater <gordslater@ieee.org>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:52:21 +0000

> I guess nobody needs ITU-T anymore, or do we ?

ZCZC

well, from vague memory, H.264, G711/729, H323, X.509 were/are ITU-T
standards - maybe X.25 too though I could have that one wrong.

I'll just sit on the fence: as an old radiocomms guy, I'd say ITU-_R_ is
still very relevant if you guys DON'T want to watch/listen N. Korean or
Bangladeshi TV/radio on your home Sat systems or car radios, to name a
couple of recently quoted countries :slight_smile:

But ITU-T? That's one for the VoIP guys to shout about.

No, it is one for everyone who does networking to shout about!

ITU is exactly the sort of organization I DON'T want to see in control
of the Internet. If you think IETF has gotten to unmanageable, wait
until you deal with the ITU-T. It is VERY lawyer heavy.

I had to attend some X.400/X.500 meetings and, while the lawyers were
never "running" anything, most of the technical people could only
speak through the lawyers and the suits out-numbered the techies by
almost two to one. And this was a low-level working group. I understand
it gets worse as you move up the ladder.

The network revolution has left the ITU-T very little to do (at least
compared to the old telco days) and they show every sign of wanting to
bring all of us wild IP folks under control.

Oh, and X.25 and X.509 are from an older organization that merged into
the ITU-T when it was created, the CCITT (International Telegraph
and Telephone Consultative Committee). It became the ITU-T in 1992.

2

Yeah, CCITT - thanks for the jog - your memory is better than mine, I
was too busy `networking` on a straight hand key and cans in `92. All
valves (tubes) and sparks tracking over the damp egg insulators :slight_smile:

I must admit to total confusion over why they need to "grab" IPs from
the v6 address space? Surely they don't need the equivalent of
band-plans for IP space? Or have I missed some v6 technical point
totally?

Gord
K

3

The ITU Secretariat and a few member states (Syria being the most frequent) point to the inequality of distribution of IPv4 space and argue that developing countries must not be left out of IPv6 the same way. They have also suggested that the establishment of "Country Internet Registries" (that is, national PTT-based allocation registries) could provide competition for the RIRs, thereby using market forces to improve address allocation services. (Please note that I am not commenting on these proposals, merely trying to summarize them in a non-biased way). There are a couple of papers put out by the ITU (or perhaps more accurately, ITU-funded folks) that discuss this. If anyone cares, I can dig them up.

There is much political froth being stirred up here.

Regards,
-drc

4

Some googling for 'itu ipv6' turns up the following (among other things):

http://www.itu.int/net/ITU-T/ipv6/itudocs.aspx

Antonio Querubin
808-545-5282 x3003
e-mail/xmpp: tony@lava.net

5

Wow, there are some real classics in there. Anyone in need of a good end-of-week belly laugh should take a look at "Delayed Contribution 93" and "Contribution 30".

The pitiful level of misunderstanding displayed by the authors of these documents is frightening.

Nick

6

Some googling for 'itu ipv6' turns up the following (among other things):

http://www.itu.int/net/ITU-T/ipv6/itudocs.aspx

yeah, yeah, ITU still making noise with the Y Series docs and NGN
(Next Generation Networks) framework.

Jeloooouuuuuuu ITU, kind of you are 25+ years late ...

7

Some googling for 'itu ipv6' turns up the following (among other things):

http://www.itu.int/net/ITU-T/ipv6/itudocs.aspx

Wow, there are some real classics in there. Anyone in need of a good end-of-week belly laugh should take a look at "Delayed Contribution 93" and "Contribution 30".

Given the folks who read/write these sorts of documents tend to make national laws attempting to implement the policies the documents describe, I'm not sure "belly laugh" is the right anatomical reaction.

The pitiful level of misunderstanding displayed by the authors of these documents is frightening.

If you want to be really frightened, remember that the IPv4 free pool is going to be exhausted in something like 576 days. Given the lack of IPv6 deployment, the subsequent food fights that erupt as markets in IPv4 addresses are established are likely going to be "interesting". Politicians very much like to be seen to be "doing something" in interesting food fights. If this causes you any level of concern, for any of you going to APNIC, you might want to participate in http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2010/apnic-29-consultation.

Regards,
-drc

8

Indeed. A username@domain is as valid a VOIP ID as is a traditional telephone number. And country coded TLDs can be moved around the net more easily than telephone country codes tied to a national carrier network.

Antonio Querubin
808-545-5282 x3003
e-mail/xmpp: tony@lava.net

9

The pitiful level of misunderstanding displayed by the authors of these
documents is frightening.

Are the ITU folks planning to manage IPv6 address space allocations
the same way they number their documents (ie no more than 100 docs per
subject on the Y series) ?

;-}

10

Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see the problem. One of the great things
about IPv6's address space being mindbogglingly large is that there's
plenty of it to experiment with. If the ITU wants an RIR-sized block
to do RIR-like work, so what? If they wanted a /2 or /4 I'd be
concerned, or if there were many organizations out there that wanted
RIR-sized chunks, but ITU's close enough to unique that they're not
going to cause the space to run out. And sure, maybe they're
sufficiently outdated and irrelevant that they could get by with a
/16, but it might be interesting to have somebody assigning IPv6
addresses as :prefix:e164:host or whatever. (Admittedly, that made
more sense back when e.164 addresses were 12 digits as opposed to the
current 15.)

11

Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see the problem.

It breaks the existing regional allocation and policy development
process model establishing a second source that will probably not just
want to "allocate" but also develop a parallel policy that will most
probably not be consistent or compatible with the other RIR's.

My .02

12

I think that "PTT" is the operative token here, but for reasons having
nothing to do with competition. If all they wanted was competition,
the easy answer would be to set up more registries -- or registrars
-- not bounded by geography; as long as the number wasn't too large, it
wouldn't do too much violence to the size of the routing tables.

If a PTT-like body is *the* registry for a country, and if the country
chose to require local ISPs and business to obtain address space from
it, what's the natural prefix announcement to the world? Right -- that
country's registry prefix, which means that all traffic to that country
just naturally flows through the PTT's routers and DPI boxes. And it
benefits everyone, right? It really cuts down on the number of prefixes
we have to worry about....

It's funny -- just yesterday, I was telling my class that the
Internet's connectivity was not like the pre-deregulation telco model.
The latter had O(1) telco/country, with highly regulated
interconnections to anywhere else. The Internet grew up under the
radar, partly because of the deregulatory climate and partly because
especially in the early days, it wasn't facilities-based -- if you
wanted an international link to a peer or a branch office, you just
leased the circuit. The result was much richer connectivity than in
the telco world, and -- in some sense -- less "order". Syria wants to
roll the clock back.

    --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

13

Syria wants to roll the clock back.

Not only Syria, some developed countries want to have 100% control of
the "big switch" to turn the net off/on, if possible on a packet by
packet basis.

PTT = Prehistoric Telecommunications Technologies ...

IMHO the most important driving factor behind all these are just
politics and power.

-J

14

There is no doubt that there will be the most unholy bun-fight.

Journalists will elevate themselves to the highest ivory towers and crow about how they foresaw all this happening years in advance, if only anyone had bothered to listen to them. Communications regulators will tut-tut loudly and commission long-winded reports on the effect of ipv4 starvation to the Digital Economy, and set up sub-committees and sub-sub-committees to examine potential solutions, all due to report within an 18-24 month time-frame, and all recommending migration to ipv6 over time (woohoo! - what insight!).

The vendors will have a field day selling NATs, carrier grade NATs and all sorts of magical upgrades, all designed at milking the last tiny amounts of value out of each single ipv4 address - and your wallet. Notwithstanding this, their IPv6 support will still be curiously badly implemented, tacked on as an afterthought for those stingy service provider types rather than the cash-cow corporates and public sector customers who'll swallow anything that's given a good review in the trade rags.

The WSIS will turn into a shouting match, or even more of a shouting match. Actually, scratch that: it'll turn into a foaming pit of rabid evangelists, each preaching their gospel of ill-informed craziness, allowing the ITU to step in and demonstrate that their mature and seasoned approach to the problem is the only realistic way of dealing with ipv4 scarcity, if only the internet and its short-sighted approach to proper standards based telco engineering were to come under their control.

And the politicians. Yes, they will erupt in hitherto unseen outbursts of self-righteous indignation at the stupid internet engineers who let this problem happen in the first place and who made no provision whatsoever for viable alternatives, and will then declare the the only reasonable way of dealing with the problem is their particular type of regulation, mandating this or that but - funnily enough - very little of it making any sense whatever and all of it adding to the old maxim that there is no problem which exists which can't be made worse by regulation. As you note, anything for a couple of column inches.

Oh, it will be fun.

Nick

15

What is more frightening is that when these authors get their contributions turned into ITU
policy, it often carries the force of law in many jurisdictions.

Owen

16

I think that "PTT" is the operative token here, but for reasons having
nothing to do with competition. If all they wanted was competition,
the easy answer would be to set up more registries -- or registrars
-- not bounded by geography; as long as the number wasn't too large, it
wouldn't do too much violence to the size of the routing tables.

If a PTT-like body is *the* registry for a country, and if the country
chose to require local ISPs and business to obtain address space from
it, what's the natural prefix announcement to the world? Right -- that
country's registry prefix, which means that all traffic to that country
just naturally flows through the PTT's routers and DPI boxes. And it
benefits everyone, right? It really cuts down on the number of prefixes
we have to worry about....

Until routing domains (i.e., ASNs) are carved up to become congruent
to national boundaries for national security, censorship or other
reasons. When this happens, not only will those IPv6 prefixes become
fragmented, so to will their legacy IPv4 space, and certainly to the
detriment of routing scalability, security, and stability.

Then add something like RPKI to the mix and you've got a very effective
hammer to enforce national policy - all network operators will use
the national RPKI trust anchor, and all of your address space will be
allocated (and certified) strictly from this national Internet registry
- so that they can surgically control precisely who can reach you, and who
you can reach - within the whole of the global routing system, and
DPI, tariffing, etc.. are all much akin to models of yester that they
can wrap their heads around.

And all the efforts and bottom-up policy driven by the RIRs in the
current model will dry up, as will the RIR revenue sources, and their
much wider contributions to the Internet community.

If you think the RIRs and the current model sucks, well, consider
the alternatives. For that matter, so to better the RIRs and their
constituents.

It's funny -- just yesterday, I was telling my class that the
Internet's connectivity was not like the pre-deregulation telco model.
The latter had O(1) telco/country, with highly regulated
interconnections to anywhere else. The Internet grew up under the
radar, partly because of the deregulatory climate and partly because
especially in the early days, it wasn't facilities-based -- if you
wanted an international link to a peer or a branch office, you just
leased the circuit. The result was much richer connectivity than in
the telco world, and -- in some sense -- less "order". Syria wants to
roll the clock back.

I can't believe that the current model of more dense interconnection,
continued disintermediation, and a far more robust IP fabric would
evolve to be more resilient and robust from national Internet registry
allocation models or the Internet routing system rearchitecting that's
sure to follow.

Of course, if the ITU-T is serious about this, they should probably be
asking for a good chunk of 32-bit ASNs as well, but that's a bit more
difficult to do under the auspices of liberating IPv6.

-danny

17

Nick Hilliard (nick) writes:

And the politicians. Yes, they will erupt in hitherto unseen
outbursts of self-righteous indignation at the stupid internet
engineers who let this problem happen in the first place and who
made no provision whatsoever for viable alternatives,

  Um, not to be the party pooper of your fire-and-brimstone scenario,
  but IPv6 deployment has taken quite a bit longer than expected.

  I'm not saying that political incentives (carrot & stick) or government
  regulations in the line of "implement IPv6 before X/Y or else..." have
  had any effect, except maybe in Japan: look how long it took for the
  EU commission to jump on the bandwagon, for instance (or for that matter,
  how long it took any government to take IP seriously).
  
  But if was asked why IPv6 hasn't been deployed earlier, I'd be hard
  pressed to come up with a simple answer. "It wasn't ready"
  is probably not considered good enough for an elected official.

  BOFH excuse generator anyone ?
  

Oh, it will be fun.

  Yay.

18

There is much political froth being stirred up here.

I don't see what the big deal is. It was patently unfair not to give
every country a one-digit country code like the US and Russia have.
So they don't want to make the same mistake with IPv6.

R's,
John

19

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Japanese government did two things:

  - tax incentivise ipv6 compliance
  - make meaningful ipv6 compliance mandatory when dealing with Japanese
government technical contracts.

The effect of this was to 1) create a direct financial incentive to deploy
meaningfully, and 2) create an indirect financial incentive to deploy ipv6
meaningfully. Spot the pattern here?

Nick

20

Long time ago (10+ years, Randy, others, correct me if I'm wrong)
Japan had the vision and strategy for embracing IPv6 to assume a
leadership position in the data telecommunications market.

I remember how often during our (VRIO) IPO due diligence and later
when the company became part of NTT, IPv6 was on every single
conversation and plans. IPv6 was a must know, must do, must have.

They knew and understood from the begining, yeah it is not a perfect
protocol, yeah it is does not provide "security" per se, yeah many
will start a catfight about NAT and other stuff, no it is not a
conspiracy from router vendors to sell you more gear. IPv4 address
space is a finite resource and sooner or later we will run out of it,
then the earlier we prepare for its replacement the better.

Meanwhile as you said, for others long term vision means the next quarter.

Jorge