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Who Will Fix the Internet? No One, Apparently
blackbearnh writes "It seems like everyone focuses on the latest and greatest killer Internet applications, but the underlying infrastructure that all of them run on is showing its age. That's the claim made by a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor. IPv4 is relatively ancient, and even stalled improvements like IPv6 aren't significant enough to matter, according to some researchers. With no one 'in charge' of the Internet, it's almost impossible to get any sweeping technical improvements made, especially since there's no financial incentive on the part of the ISPs and telecoms to invest in basic infrastructure. CalTech Professor John Doyle puts it this way: 'To the extent I've been working in this field for the last 10 years, I've been mostly working on band-aids. I'm really trying to get out of that business and try to help the people, the few people, who are really trying to think more fundamentally about what needs to be done.'"
Yes. It's a very respectable source indeed. Also, Christian Science (promoted by Christian Scientists) is entirely different from the science promoted by Christians (who are a different group).
Ignorance is bliss, and you, sir, seem to be positively rolling in it. CSM, strange as it may seem, is generally regarded as being of surpassing quality (vastly superior to your "mainline" news channels and rags).
The irony is that most religious people I know revile the CSM as being liberal, ungodly, and in all manner of secular.
@&%*@... &*(&%(*... NO CARRIER
Fixed that for you :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
If we allowed more competition,...
It's not merely an issue of allowing more competition. For example, here in California cable TV is not a state-granted monopoly. And yet, you will find close to zero overlapping cable TV regions. Why? Because it makes little economic sense to the operators to do that. One operator, having paid for infrastructure, can lower prices in its region to below what a new competitor could afford, because the new competitor, having to lay down duplicate infrastructure, will be taking it over the barrel on paying for its new infrastructure. So the new operator just shies off from the whole thing. It's really a kind of willful collusion, but there's nothing evil about it. It's just good, obvious business sense.
At best, you can hope for the phone company, the cable company, and maybe some new third leg of wireless operators to form some kind of three way competitive market for delivery services. I don't think this is nearly enough, however, for any thing at all resembling competition. Markets with relatively small numbers of participants tend to engage in huge amounts of tacit collusion. Basically, it's very easy for the various players to watch each other's prices, set similar price points, and become lax about the whole thing. The victim is the consumer.
Real competition occurs in thriving markets where new competitors enter with innovations that lower the fundamental cost basis of their products. This forces competitors to adopt similar innovations or die. This seldom happens in small markets with a static set of competitors, because they're all set in their ways, and know the others are set in their ways. I.e., they can happily never change a thing and GET AWAY WITH IT.
So basically, don't hold your breath on any kind of real competition occurring here. While I'm a big fan of competitive markets, I'm a big cynic on this market. On a bad day, in a bad mood, I think we should just regulate the entire thing.
C//
To quote an article I once read that addressed what you are saying:
The long and the short of it is that NAT is only a band-aid... it is not a scalable solution. NAT can only be "good enough" as long as the above issues remain unimportant to a majority of people.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The grandparent said 'If you use Apple'. What he meant was if you use a recent (last few years) Airport wireless bridge / router from Apple. In this case, it will automatically configure itself using 6to4 when connected to a v4-only upstream network and advertise itself on the local network as a v6 router. As he said, if you have one of these (or some other router that does 6to4) then you may be using v6 automatically. And when your ISP starts assigning v6 subnets then the router will just acquire one and stuff will continue to work automatically without any problems, just with a bit less overhead because you won't be encapsulating v6 packets in IPv4 to push them across a v4-only network segment. Two people using this system, or one using this and the other using a v6 connection from their ISP can exchange v6 traffic.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
To add to the other good replies to your message.
"Recalling" those "huge" blocks (and note that there is no legal justification for any entity to be able to do so) would also only be a band-aid. If you "recall" all of the /8 blocks that are globally assigned that are likely underutilized, you only extend the lifetime of IPv4 by a handful of years.
Many people point to NAT as a way to prevent the depletion of IPv4 address space, but what most of them don't realize is that NAT (despite the huge problems that hitch along for the ride) has *already* served that purpose. We're *still* running out of IPv4 address space, even with ubiquitous use of NAT (including being hobbled by the problems that it brings). If NAT hadn't seen widespread use already, we would have run out of IPv4 address space years ago.
NAT creates problems, and it doesn't even fix the problem that people are positioning it to fix (ie, the depletion of IPv4 address space). We're still going to run out, we still need to transition to IPv6, even if you "recall" those big blocks and make everyone use NAT. Taking the steps you suggest only extends the horizon of the problem, and only extends it by a relatively small amount.
The US Federal government is also moving to IPv6 as well. It is now required that their vendors support it.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Clearly you don't know what the Christian Science Monitor is. The CSM is not only widely regarded, winning numerous (ironically) Pulitzer Prizes, but given it's awesome "Fuck you, you lying douche bag, Joseph Pulitzer!" origin, it's positively punk rock.