The IPv6 Debacle: A cautionary tale for all technologists

The Internet community has long known that the dominant network layer protocol, IPv4, could not scale to support the levels of Internet growth that became expected during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and yet the replacement protocol IPv6 has not achieved widespread use. This presentation argues...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Dell, Peter
Format: Conference Paper
Published: IEEE 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/79547
_version_ 1848764070244646912
author Dell, Peter
author_facet Dell, Peter
author_sort Dell, Peter
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description The Internet community has long known that the dominant network layer protocol, IPv4, could not scale to support the levels of Internet growth that became expected during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and yet the replacement protocol IPv6 has not achieved widespread use. This presentation argues that the dual-stacking transition technique did not adequately consult non-technical perspectives and as a consequence was always unlikely to succeed. This has led to the present-day situation in which the number of Internet-connected devices vastly outnumbers the address space, in which work-arounds or “kludges” are used to eke out more and more connectivity from the IPv4 address space, and in which Internet governance policies have been changed to allow markets in which IPv4 address space is traded between organisations to operate. And yet although these markets were expected to facilitate the movement of address space from highly-allocated to relatively lower-allocated economies – which are generally in developing countries – yet the limited evidence available suggests that address space is rarely traded across national boundaries. Are these policies effective? Are we repeating the mistake of not consulting diverse perspectives?
first_indexed 2025-11-14T11:13:30Z
format Conference Paper
id curtin-20.500.11937-79547
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T11:13:30Z
publishDate 2019
publisher IEEE
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-795472020-06-09T00:47:28Z The IPv6 Debacle: A cautionary tale for all technologists Dell, Peter 0806 - Information Systems The Internet community has long known that the dominant network layer protocol, IPv4, could not scale to support the levels of Internet growth that became expected during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and yet the replacement protocol IPv6 has not achieved widespread use. This presentation argues that the dual-stacking transition technique did not adequately consult non-technical perspectives and as a consequence was always unlikely to succeed. This has led to the present-day situation in which the number of Internet-connected devices vastly outnumbers the address space, in which work-arounds or “kludges” are used to eke out more and more connectivity from the IPv4 address space, and in which Internet governance policies have been changed to allow markets in which IPv4 address space is traded between organisations to operate. And yet although these markets were expected to facilitate the movement of address space from highly-allocated to relatively lower-allocated economies – which are generally in developing countries – yet the limited evidence available suggests that address space is rarely traded across national boundaries. Are these policies effective? Are we repeating the mistake of not consulting diverse perspectives? 2019 Conference Paper http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/79547 10.1109/IoTaIS47347.2019 IEEE restricted
spellingShingle 0806 - Information Systems
Dell, Peter
The IPv6 Debacle: A cautionary tale for all technologists
title The IPv6 Debacle: A cautionary tale for all technologists
title_full The IPv6 Debacle: A cautionary tale for all technologists
title_fullStr The IPv6 Debacle: A cautionary tale for all technologists
title_full_unstemmed The IPv6 Debacle: A cautionary tale for all technologists
title_short The IPv6 Debacle: A cautionary tale for all technologists
title_sort ipv6 debacle: a cautionary tale for all technologists
topic 0806 - Information Systems
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/79547