On 26/02/2010 22:13, David Conrad wrote:
If you want to be really frightened, remember that the IPv4 free pool is going to be exhausted in something like 576 days. Given the lack of IPv6 deployment, the subsequent food fights that erupt as markets in IPv4 addresses are established are likely going to be "interesting". Politicians very much like to be seen to be "doing something" in interesting food fights.
There is no doubt that there will be the most unholy bun-fight. Journalists will elevate themselves to the highest ivory towers and crow about how they foresaw all this happening years in advance, if only anyone had bothered to listen to them. Communications regulators will tut-tut loudly and commission long-winded reports on the effect of ipv4 starvation to the Digital Economy, and set up sub-committees and sub-sub-committees to examine potential solutions, all due to report within an 18-24 month time-frame, and all recommending migration to ipv6 over time (woohoo! - what insight!). The vendors will have a field day selling NATs, carrier grade NATs and all sorts of magical upgrades, all designed at milking the last tiny amounts of value out of each single ipv4 address - and your wallet. Notwithstanding this, their IPv6 support will still be curiously badly implemented, tacked on as an afterthought for those stingy service provider types rather than the cash-cow corporates and public sector customers who'll swallow anything that's given a good review in the trade rags. The WSIS will turn into a shouting match, or even more of a shouting match. Actually, scratch that: it'll turn into a foaming pit of rabid evangelists, each preaching their gospel of ill-informed craziness, allowing the ITU to step in and demonstrate that their mature and seasoned approach to the problem is the only realistic way of dealing with ipv4 scarcity, if only the internet and its short-sighted approach to proper standards based telco engineering were to come under their control. And the politicians. Yes, they will erupt in hitherto unseen outbursts of self-righteous indignation at the stupid internet engineers who let this problem happen in the first place and who made no provision whatsoever for viable alternatives, and will then declare the the only reasonable way of dealing with the problem is their particular type of regulation, mandating this or that but - funnily enough - very little of it making any sense whatever and all of it adding to the old maxim that there is no problem which exists which can't be made worse by regulation. As you note, anything for a couple of column inches. Oh, it will be fun. Nick