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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."
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.