Major 'Net Players Mulling IPv6 Whitelist

netbuzz writes "From this week's IETF meeting in Anaheim comes word that leading Web content providers are talking about creating a shared list of customers who can access their Web sites via IPv6. The DNS Whitelist for IPv6 would be used to serve content to these IP addresses via IPv6 rather than through IPv4. David Temkin, network engineering manager with Netflix, says: 'We're looking into the same service that Google has, where we will try to track what connectivity the user has. We're in discussions with Google, Yahoo, Netflix and Microsoft to see whether it makes sense to have a shared, open source DNS whitelist service.' ISPs are not wild about the idea."

Comments

ISPs are not wild about the idea.

[John Hasler]

If ISPs would get their heads out of their asses "this idea" would not be needed.

Re:ISPs are not wild about the idea.

[mellon]

Actually it's not the ISPs they're referring to who have their heads in their asses. Indeed, I don't think anybody has their heads in their asses on this one--each side of the discussion has legitimate points. From the perspective of IPv6 deployment, the whitelists suck, because mostly they prevent people who are trying to use IPv6 from using it--you have to be on the whitelist before you can get AAAA records from these online services. It's very hard to get on the whitelist, and very easy to get knocked off of it.

ISPs who are deploying IPv6 want to just get the AAAA records, and not have to jump through hoops to get on a whitelist. But the providers worry about people who have crappy home gateways that fall over and die when they get AAAA records, and also about people who have devices on their networks advertising IPv6 connectivity, when they don't actually have it. One presentation in that meeting set the number at about .8% of users, which they felt was too many.

Personally, I think they should just turn on the AAAA records and let the customers who have broken routers see that their routers are broken and fix them. But it's a rough tradeoff--IPv6 has at times gotten a bad rep for being the cause of network problems, and so network no-nothings tend to tell you "IPv6 is the problem" when in fact it's bad code on embedded devices that's the problem. Since disabling IPv6 "fixes" it, IPv6 gets the blame. That's the rationale for the whitelists, and as much as I hate them, I can't say that this rationale is completely wrong.

Re:ISPs are not wild about the idea.

[Abcd1234]

Actually it's not the ISPs they're referring to who have their heads in their asses. Indeed, I don't think anybody has their heads in their asses on this one--each side of the discussion has legitimate points. From the perspective of IPv6 deployment, the whitelists suck, because mostly they prevent people who are trying to use IPv6 from using it--you have to be on the whitelist before you can get AAAA records from these online services. It's very hard to get on the whitelist, and very easy to get knocked off of it.

Meh, I dunno, I don't personally see the problem with this. Making it difficult to get on the whitelist ensures that customers are getting decent v6 connectivity, and in the end, that's a good thing. And I've not heard of a case of some ISP being unilaterally dropped from the whitelist... perhaps you have anecdotes to support that assertion?

Meanwhile, the providers have a very real reason to be concerned. As you say, there's some very broken equipment out there that ends up creating a real impact on the user experience. Yeah, that gear should be scrapped, but in many cases we're talking home routers that people don't even realize are broken. But if the ISPs just provided v6 connectivity, many of those issues would disappear (as those routers would then have v6 connectivity, so the broken routes they previously advertised would now work).

In the end, I honestly don't see any other way to deal with this issue. Providers aren't going to advertise AAAA records until they can be confident that the userbase won't be impacted by onerous delays and connection timeouts. And ISPs won't roll out v6 until there's customer demand for it. The solution solves the issues on the content provider side, and once that happens, that might clear the logjam that's currently stopping v6 from being deployed on a larger scale.

Not a "whitelist"

[pem]

This is not a whitelist proposal.

This is the mother of all cookies.

Nice Try but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice idea

But

1) When are ISP's going to get off their Fat backsides and implement IPV6? Most in my part of the world have no plans to do this for 1-2 years.
2) When are the DSL Modem makers going to implement IPV6 in the devices that are sold to the majority of us?

Shame that it ain't going to get a lot of use outside the corporate world.

Re:Nice Try but...

[Kjella]

The real issue I think is, who wants an IP6-only Internet connection? NOBODY. Because despite everything, there's millions of applications and shit that won't work because they assume there's nothing but IPv4. You can pry my IPv4 address from my cold dead hands, being on IPv6 would be very close to being permanently behind NAT - you get out, nothing gets in. And if you're handing out a IPv4 address as well, you've gained nothing. I'm guessing someone at the bottom of some barrel somewhere end up taking it anyway because that's all there is, but it won't be in the first world countries. That is the only way it'll really happen beyond nice bullet points on how we should all go IPv6.

This doesn't have to last long

[Xipher]

Any ISP that's not "wild" about the idea should step up and work with the community on actually getting IPv6 connectivity as functional as IPv4. I can see Google/Netflix perspective here. If they don't have some sort of white list they will get a black eye for having poor service when it's not even a result of something they control. Hopefully this will be something very short lived but I can imaging if service providers don't step up and start taking IPv6 seriously it's just going to prolong the issue.

I'm sure they have a reason for it...

[pathological liar]

The article doesn't make it particularly clear what that might be though. The closest I found was:

"There's a pretty key reason for whitelisting," Temkin explains. "It's really, really easy for anyone using, for example, Hurricane Electric's tunneling to find that the IPv6 network becomes an island and that it is broken because they didn't update a tunnel...You end up with the customer having a bad experience. They never see the content or they only see the content after a 30-second wait."

Which seems like a no-brainer to me: Fix the tunnel. I don't even understand how the whitelist might help that -- if the whitelist says "This user has IPv6 connectivity" and you have a broken tunnel either you don't get the content at all, or you still only see the content after a 30-second wait.

The real 'island' problem is that IPv6 routing is kind of a mess. If you're on the east coast of North America and want to connect to western Europe, depending on who your provider is it may well decide to send all of your traffic through Korea, if it even makes it to your target at all. I imagine that's a problem that will solve itself as more routes come online.

Re:Why do they need a whitelist

[TheRaven64]

Part of the problem is that you may have local network IPv6 connectivity but not Internet IPv6 connectivity. Your application looks up an AAAA record, tries to connect, and fails. Hopefully it will then try the A record (if you use gethostent() then you will do this automatically), but it will have to wait for the connection to fail before doing this, which may take a while.

Re:Why do they need a whitelist

[Fastolfe]

This is to deal with cases where an ISP sets up "trial" or "beta" IPv6 services for their users, and they don't support it as well as their existing IPv4 service. They might have an IPv6 outage for hours or days, but nobody cares because it's just a trial, right? Meanwhile, the user is having an awful experience trying to pull up www.google.com, and they don't know why, and since every other web site seems to come up without a problem (because they're all still on IPv4), they conclude that it's a problem with Google.

You can avoid much of this by whitelisting ISPs that have demonstrated that they actually care about IPv6.