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UK Organization Set Up To Encourage IPv6 Adoption Closes
New submitter Sesostris III writes "In April 2010, with £20,000 of government money, 6uk was set up to encourage the adoption of the IPv6 protocol in the UK. In December 2012 the board resigned en-masse in protest at official indifference to its work. 'The biggest organization we needed to join 6UK was the government,' the former director, Philip Sheldrake, is quoted as saying. Without government support, 'there's no material incentive for any organization to go for IPv6.' Government interest can be gauged by the fact that no government website currently sat on an IPv6 address. The UK is among the nations that have done the least to move to IPv6, and lags behind other nations in adopting the new protocol. In contrast, governments like that in the U.S. are encouraging adoption of the new protocol by mandating IPv6 compliance in contracts."
I come from an Asian country with mostly shared ip address space. The divitation was never honest. It was first-come-first-serve. Both US and UK have lots of ip addresses to use, and it's wrong. Asia has much larger population too! I don't expect any new change to it, but just stating the facts.
Perhaps it's best when government money isn't wasted on ineptitude. Heck, if more people thought like that in the USA we could eliminate the national debt in three years.
Sadly, most of the idiots out there still equate throwing government shekels at a problem with 'doing something.'
I've been using IPv6 for 8 years or so and I really don't care what other people do. The main value for me is that all boxen on the LAN have their own IPv6 IPs so I can ssh to them and scp stuff around. My websites all have IPv6 availability, but nobody uses that, so I see why people don't bother. But I personally think the benefits of having IPv6 on your own stuff makes learning and using it worth while.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I hate to say it, but I think IPv6 is at the bottom of the priority queue of David Cameron. Anything that drive up the cost should be avoided. This includes the cost of equipment upgrade, and the cost of hiring sensible contractor...
I think the government is a bit too thick to see that mandating IPv6 is a business opportunity for the private sectors...
"Why evacuate now? The hurricane is still 10 miles away."
The UK is currently in the process of developing & deploying a network for government agencies to use called the PSN (public services network). It's sort of a replacement for the GSI. It runs on IPv4, most likely using the DWP address space discussed here.
Pretty much all the UK telcos & several global network manufacturers are involved with the PSN so it's a real missed opportunity that they didn't go with IPv6 for it.
They lasted a lot longer than I expected. £20,000 is a really small amount of money so for it to last over two years is impressive.
£20,000 isn't a "really" small amount of money. £20,000 is an absurdly small amount of money. :-O
I notice that the website describes it as "seed funding". Realistically, I'd have thought that £20,000 was very low even for that purpose. That would about cover the pay of a *single* person for *one* year at less than average UK wages. And that wouldn't leave anything over for expenses.
At any rate, I was going to comment something along the lines of...
April 2010 - Labour gives government support to new body 6uk.
May 2010 - Labour kicked out of power, David Cameron and his Etonian chums, er... the Conservatives come in to power. Somewhat indifferent to Labour-supported project. Hmm.
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I like to observe the ineptitude of governments around the world in driving IPv6 adoption and compare it with their similarly inept response to Global Warming.
In both cases, a slow but steady change is going to cause inevitable disaster. Foresight and planning is required, and government incentives or lawmaking is basically a must, because in both cases no individual benefits from saving the world, so why spend the money?
The difference is that the IP address shortage is a trivial problem to foresee and solve. It's like a toy version of Global Warming. A mock disaster to test the government's mettle. For example, unlike Global Warming, the IP address shortage is trivially predicted. We knew what month the last block was going to run out something like two years ahead of time! It's simple maths. There's no theory. There's no complex feedback cycles. There's no doubt. We have a fixed, unchangeable amount of something, we're using it faster and faster, there's still a huge number of potential users. It's going to run out.
Similarly, the fix is also trivial compared to Global Warming. Had, say, the EU made a new law that all imported electronics that can be connected to the Internet have mandatory IPv6 support enabled by default, that alone would have been sufficient. That's it. A piece of legislation, requiring some talking and a few pieces of paper. The cost of some electronics might have gone up an average of 50c or somesuch, but the problem would have been solved practically overnight! No manufacturer with a global market could afford to neglect IPv6 support. Common software platforms would have resulted in IPv6 everywhere, for everyone, because of one change in one law in one place.
Instead, what do we get? Half-solutions like NAT. Various groups with no teeth that can "encourage" and "assist" the adoption of IPv6. Piecemeal adoption that means that nobody can go IPv6-only any time soon. Meetings with "industry experts", half of which work for corporations that still have an IPv4-only Internet presence. Conferences. Studies. Wastes of time and money.
I bet 90% of legislators around the world haven't even heard of IPv6, or still don't know what it's all about.
Meanwhile, think about it: in the Western world and increasingly everywhere else, Internet access is now basically an "essential human right", much like clean drinking water, transport, electricity, or health care. I mean seriously, would YOU buy a house in a location where you could get water and electricity, but not the Internet? Exactly.
Now go back to the legislators. This -- now essential -- service is breaking in a trivially predictable way, and they haven't even fucking bothered to do the simplest things to actually fix the problem.
Instead what we're going to see is parasitic rent-seeking: the value of IPv4 addresses will skyrocket. Full, bi-directional Internet access will become a privilege, concentrated into the hands of corporations. Their investments in addresses will appreciate over time, hence predictably they will have a vested interest in maintaining and growing this wealth. Expect to see dirty tactics and corruption used to block IPv6 adoption to prevent a devaluation of IPv4 address "property". This might get bad enough that IPv6 will never be adopted, because there will be significant pressure against it!
Now think about how much worse Global Warming is going to be! It's far off into the future. Decades at least until serious effects are felt anywhere. The science is complex, and difficult for laymen to understand. There are already vested interests to deny it, to the tune of trillions of dollars. The fix -- if any -- wouldn't be 50c per purchase, it might be more like 50%!
Why the fuck do we keep voting these people into power?
Additional; for non-UK readers, at today's exchange rates £20,000 = US $32,078.
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There are no more anyway.. RIPE ran out in September.
In the future ISPs and Government are going to have to go ipv6 or have everyone dealing with cgnat (which will be 'fun').