We live in a world of changes
The fifth week of conferences since October has just ended. I am sitting at O’Hare airport waiting for my flight to Copenhagen. Copenhagen in a part of the world that seems to be covered in snow. Early, far too early. And the conferences are not over for 2008 yet. One more…in India, and a few short meetings in Stockholm and New York. Then I will have a long vacation.
The conferences have been covering everything from deep technical discussions on the new protocols to high level policy and international political discussions. But the things discussed are very similar.
IPv6, or rather, IPv4 is discussed. When will we run out? What does that imply? What can we do about it? Do you use IPv6 yet? Can we not just tell everyone to use IPv6?
Of course we can not tell people to use IPv6! People use whatever they use to access their Google, theirFacebook, their Internet. But the question is not whether they will do that. The question is whether your Internet is the same as my Internet. Will they be the same? People discuss too much I think how many customers can access one service. What we can do to support all the one-to-many architectures out there. Like Spotify that I like so much. More people should do many-to-many applications. In reality only Apple tries to do that. P2P services of today is sort of cheating. So they do not count.
Domain names are also interesting to people. Or rather, interesting to the people that make money on the domain name market. When did you hear anyone asking for a new top level domain? I thought so. At the same time ICANN, responsible for these kind of discussions, have started a process of adding new top level domains. Potentially many of them. If ICANN continue to create TLDs on request to the one that pays, is not ICANN very similar to what good old Network Solutions was once upon a time before the IAHC process started? Of course there is a big difference in accountability and stakeholder participation, but it is also because of that I think ICANN should focus on accountability in the process of renewal of the organisation.
And finally DNSSEC. This interesting technology that is the only today known mechanism that protects us against many not only known, but also used, attacks against the DNS. NTIA has a Notice of Inquiry open that is to be responded to Monday November 23 24, i.e. today. Many organisations either has already responded or will respond. And of course there are both good responses like the one from Internet Architecture Board, and surprising ones (I am not pointing at any particular, I leave that as an exercise to the reader). DNSSEC is needed, now. But we should not do anything in panic. Fast but not hastily as my friend Daniel Karrenberg said.
The overall issue with these discussions is I think that there are too many that are conservative. That live in what for me is a day of yesterday. The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet. as William Gibson said. That is so true.
