Proposals at ITU-T for Internet Evolution Raise Serious Concerns; According to ISOC Huawei, Chinese Carriers, and China want to Redesign a Prominent Part of the Internet via a set of “New IP” Proposals
Any new initiative has pros and cons, but according to ISOC (Internet Society), the “New IP” proposals are threatening and should be discussed further.
We caught up with Hosein Badran to give us the good, bad, and ugly of the “New IP” proposals. Badran is a senior director for ISOC and leads the technology, policy, and advocacy initiatives in Internet access, infrastructure, and trust domains.
This has been going around for at least two years, makes for some
great scary, click-bait headlines ("they propose an internet kill
switch! For China!", and so forth.)
Besides the obvious question, "by what authority will they move this
forward?" many of us looked at the proposals and they're, in a word,
idiocy.
I found this the following to a reasonably pragmatic and thoughtful,
albeit US-centric, compilation of policy thinking that is not from the
usual communications world:
I reached a couple weeks ago with my PC hat on to see if someone
representing that thinking would be interested in giving a presentation
at a future NANOG. The contacts expressed at least a willingness to
find someone.
If anyone thinks it particularly worthwhile or not for me to press a bit
more, shoot me an email off line with your thoughts.
1) I was made aware of the referenced "New IP" efforts about two years ago. After watching the below online discussion video recording, in particular, Andrew Sullivan's comments near the end (starting at time marker 00:53:42) that reminded us about thefull architecture versus building block approaches, the super importance of incremental deployability and the main issue of IPv6 being formally incompatible with IPv4, etc., I posted a feedback there.
2) Essentially, I offered our EzIP RAN (Regional Area Network) configuration as the "New IP" test bed. So that they could have a real life demonstration setup going within the existing Internet environment, yet independent of the current operations. It could avoid spending a lot of efforts on conceptually convincing others by theoretical analysis and reasoning. We had some follow-up exchanges. But, they continued on with their original way.
It's short and worth a read though most anyone here can skip down
about 3/4 to the paragraph beginning with "First, Washington should
consolidate..." unless you really need an explanation of why DDoS is a
problem (not a complaint, their target audience might benefit.)
It's CFR, the "Council on Foreign Relations", that venerable
institution which is chock-a-block full of politicians etc many of
whose names you probably know (like former PMs, CEOs of firms like
Blackrock and the Carlyle Group), Angelina Jolie, Fareed Zakaria, etc.
They also publish "Foreign Affairs" which I subscribe to and is
worthwhile, only $40/year, six issues. You can probably pick an issue
up at a better magazine stand (e.g., one inside a bookstore like
Barnes & Noble.)
They provoke a lot of paranoia among the paranoid who are sure they're
the star chamber for George Soros or whatever the want to plug in, the
seat of the Illuminati (TM). I doubt it.
AS TO THE LINKED ARTICLE...
I always have this problem with such articles where my brain plugs in
"sidewalks" for "internet" like "thousands of people have been
murdered on sidewalks!", "criminals often use sidewalks to commit
nefarious financial crimes!", "when are we going to finally take the
problems of sidewalks seriously?!"
There's also a hard to miss "when will Washington do something!?" as
if it's entirely in the hands of the US tho admittedly the US may have
some influence. But such is CFR.