IPv6 woes - RFC

Sat Sep 18 03:40:56 UTC 2021

> On Sep 11, 2021, at 13:17 , John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
> 
>>> Indeed.  They would send postcards to all their customers saying
>>> "Comcast has said they will cut off your access to Netflix on April 1,
>>> Call their president's office at 1-800-xxx-xxxx and tell them what you think."
>> 
>> Nope… Netflix is fully available on IPv6 and actually looks forward to ISPs
>> doing this.
> 
> OK, then Disney+ or Hulu or whoever.  Peering wars never end well.  Don't even need postcards, just stick the flyer in with the bill.

Is that really cheaper and easier than deploying IPv6? Really?

>> Now Amazon might send post cards saying “Comcast has said that they
>> will cut off your access to our store…”, but I suspect that the cost of such
>> a campaign and the collateral damage would be well in excess of the
>> cost of just adding IPv6 to their service.
> 
> AWS has perfectly good support for IPv6 so they must have business reasons to stick with v4.  But I expect the cost of putting up banners on the homepage saying to call your ISP, for people coming through the relevant ISP, would be pretty cheap, and Amazon's customers appear to like their accounts and their Prime quite a lot.  Again, peering wars never end well.

This isn’t really the same as a peering war, however. They can’t really claim Comcast is going to cut you off. They’d have to admit that Comcast is going to start charging more for…

Remember, I didn’t suggest that Comcast turn off IPv4… I suggested that Comcast start passing along some of the added expense of maintaining IPv4 connectivity to the customers that want it.

> This ignores the question of what the advantage to the ISP would be other than bloody-mindedness.  The world is not going to abandon IPv4 any time soon and the last time I looked, the cost of routing packets is the same regardless of which header they have.

You haven’t looked in depth, then. The cost of routing packets is the same. The cost of dealing with address shortages and supporting/maintaining the various hacks and workarounds intended to help mitigate that issue continues to increase.

As I have repeatedly stated, the perverse incentive here that drives things is that those who lag aren’t bearing most of the costs. Instead, like toxic polluters, they are able to externalize those costs to developers, eyeball ISPs, CDNs, and others while continuing the status quo.

The flyer in the bill thing works both ways. Comcast could just as easily put in a flyer that points out the facts of the situation:

1.	There is a flaw in the addressing scheme currently in use in that it doesn’t have enough addresses for everyone.
2.	There is a new-iso addressing scheme that has been in use for more than 20 years now.
3.	Many services are available through either addressing scheme today.
4.	The cost of preserving connectivity to the old addressing scheme is continuing to increase.
5.	As a result, starting on <X date in the future>, we will be passing some of those costs on to customers who still
	want to use the old addressing scheme in the form of an “IPv4 Surcharge”.
6.	For more details and to see a list of popular services that do and don’t currently work with the new addressing scheme,
	check <link>here</link>.

If the surcharge starts out at something silly like $2/month or even $5/month, I bet most customers just pay it.

Large chunks of the world (those that have IPv6 deployed) would love to abandon or mostly abandon IPv4 as soon
as possible. That possibility isn’t defined as “when everybody has IPv6”. It’s defined (for at least eyeball ISPs) as
“When enough of the content providers our customers care about are on IPv6 that the business we lose by turning
off IPv4 costs less than maintaining IPv4 for all of our customers.”

That day may not be today, but it is coming and I don’t think it’s as far off as you imagine.

The soft way for eyeball ISPs to approach that is to start passing along some of those costs to their customers by
making IPv4 an opt-in add-on to their Internet Service with a nominal charge. Sort of like the fee I used to pay when
I had cable TV service where they charged me ~$5 every month for “access to local sports” which I didn’t want
and repeatedly asked them to stop.

Owen