[address-policy-wg] 2015-05

On 23/10/15 13:23, Aleksi Suhonen wrote:

> -- 
>     Aleksi Suhonen
> 
>     () ascii ribbon campaign
>     /\ support plain text e-mail

Hi, time traveller! Welcome to the future!

I'm sure you're excited and eager to discover what has changed over the past 17
years. You probably find today's Internet a confusing place, much different from
the one you left behind. From your e-mail, I deduct that you are completely
puzzled by the current top-down approach to Internet governance and find
yourself wishing to return to the grass-root pseudo-anarchy of yesteryear with
which you're familiar.

The evolution of the Internet may seem puzzling to you at first. Regulated,
accountable, available universally and provided in some countries to all
citizens as a basic human right, this always-on global network became an
integral part of the world's economy. It is relied upon by billions for both
personal and professional use, communication and entertainment, commerce and dating.

To ease your transition, here are a few highlights of what has taken place in
the time you skipped:

CPU speeds have grown by a factor of x50; while your desktop is quite likely
powered by an AMD K6-2 CPU running at 266Mhz, by 2003 a desktop CPU model ran at
speeds of up to 2400Mhz, and today, it would not be uncommon to own a desktop
CPU which runs at upwards of 3000Mhz and offers up to 4 computation cores, such
as Intel's 6th generation i7 CPU. For simplicity, you can think of it as a
12000Mhz CPU available in both desktops and laptops (you may know them as
"notebooks").

If you stop by an electronics retailer and pick up a new computer, however,
you're probably going to find yourself somewhat disappointed. It will not feel
considerably faster than the one you've left behind. This is because we've also
increased the amount of abstraction on which we rely quite considerably. We no
longer write any assembly, and rarely write C or C++. Instead, we rely on
interpreted computer languages, or languages which are just-in-time bytecode
compiled to be executed by a virtual machine. This may sound a little wasteful,
but you'll learn to love it. It also makes optimization someone else's problem,
and *everyone* loves that!

You'll be happy to hear that this computational excess unleashed a flurry of new
programming languages which made programming easier than ever. Programming no
longer requires any understanding of the underlying hardware architecture on
which the program will be executed, and more people are writing software now
than ever before!

By the way, you remember JavaScript? You may have used it to play a sound or
make an image move when a mouse was hovered over a specific section of that
GeoCities homepage you've built with Netscape Navigator Gold? It's grown quite a
bit in popularity, and today it's used to write most software, large and small.
>From demanding and scalable server software to games, there's hardly a problem
node.js isn't an ideal tool for solving!

Storage costs have decreased and capacity has increased by more than x1000 as
well! You probably own a 6.4GB drive for which you've paid about 330$. Today,
that kind of money would buy you a 6TB drive, easily! You'll still be constantly
running out of space, though. High definition video became commonplace,
photography has been replaced with digital photography and stills are now taken
with digital camera sensors capable of capturing tens of millions of pixels.

Internet connectivity speeds have really boomed, increasing by as much as x2000!
While you're probably used to a 56Kbps dial-up modem, today, for the same money
you paid for your dial-up account, you can get 100Mbps+ service on DOCSIS 3.0
over a coaxial cable plant operated by a cable TV provider. Cable TV, by the
way, isn't so hot any more.

Now, all of these exciting changes bring us back to the subject of Internet
governance. The RIPE NCC of your days operated not much different than, say, a
wedding gift registry. It was a convenient arrangement that helped you avoid
embarrassing yourself by showing up to the party with the exact same waffle iron
someone else has already bought for the lucky couple. Adding and removing things
to and from the registry was quite easy, and generally, everyone was quite happy
if the registry was consulted at all.

As the number of people and devices connected to the Internet increased, and
most of these people and devices remained connected all the time, it became
apparent that IPv4 addresses will soon run out. Initially, the reaction was that
of total disbelief. Surely, 4 billion is a very large number that's almost
indistinguishable from infinity? This layman argument resulted in the Internet
community spending about a decade between 2000 and 2010 pretending that the
problem does not, in fact, exist.

In the meanwhile, a few people worked to introduce a new protocol known as IPv6,
which aimed to both solve a wide range of problems and expand the number of
addresses available. They spent about a decade being largely ignored and laughed
at, and were repeatedly told by the Internet community that their new protocol
changes too many things which work, and is too different from the IPv4 protocol
to understand or implement.

After they have, in despair, removed most of these features and made IPv6 look
and work almost exactly like IPv4, the same Internet community that previously
told them that IPv6 changed too many things began complaining that the IPv6
protocol is insufficiently revolutionary and does not address some of the core
challenges which would justify the large expense of a transition. Unfortunately,
by that time IPv4 addresses largely ran out and a transition was necessary anyway.

In 2007, an Irishman introduced a RIPE policy proposal that became known as
policy 2007-01, it granted RIPE NCC a wide range of powers which turned it from
a beloved wedding cake registry to something akin to a regulator. RIPE NCC was
bestowed with considerable new powers, which it proceeded to consolidate by
aggressively reaching out to all resource holders of IPv4 addresses and AS
numbers, binding them contractually directly under its control. The RIPE
community then passed emergency measures to prevent the complete exhaustion of
IPv4 addresses, and emphasized accountability and conservation on all fronts, as
well as the need to transition to IPv6.

As I write this, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 isn't nearly complete. The
IPv4 address pool is almost completely depleted. New solutions keep being
proposed that range from the delusional to the discriminatory. Welcome to the
future!

On, and by the way, the ASCII ribbon campaign officially ended in June, 2013. We
lost. Apparently, plain text e-mail just lacked enough "pizzazz".

--
Best regards and success on your journey,

David Monosov