IPv6 woes - RFC

Wed Sep 15 21:20:40 UTC 2021

The 600 ton elephant in the room is anyone could right now sit down
and design and deploy some alternative to IPv4/IPv6 and from there
begin writing down how they did it as a series of standards documents
and encourage others to give it a try hoping for some snowball effect.

You just float it on top of the current probably IP layer tho there
are other possibilities, not too many (pick a layer.)

What much of the muttering is about is people (who never do things
like this) tend to be risk-averse and want someone or something on
high to bless and nurture their efforts.

That's what much of this discussion about some alternative to IPv6
comes down to, risk aversion, how do you know if you sat down and
began working out an alternative you'd be rewarded for your efforts.

You Don't!

Imagine if Linus Torvalds sat waiting for the POSIX committees et al
to take up his ideas for an alternative to Unix (TM). He'd still be
waiting.

Probably one of the worst problems with IPv6 is precisely the fact
that groups of people managed to ride directly on the then rapid
growth of IPv4 and turn out whatever a dozen or so strangers in
windowless hotel rooms and some email lists could agree on, including
all sorts of vested interests (e.g., router vendors and the big tech
of the day.) Clearly it wasn't completely insidious, it all kind of
works, it's just that there's been a lot of resistance to adoption
hence a sense that something's wrong.

The world is your oyster (TheWorld is mine :-)).

P.S. One might want to keep in mind a quote often attributed to Bill
Joy (one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, and a lot of other
stuff), roughly:

  In order for a new technology to succeed it has to be ten times
  better than what it seeks to replace (i.e., to overcome incumbency
  and inertia.)

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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