[I posted the following on CircleID today:]

As is well known to most CircleID readers — but importantly, not to most other Internet users — in March 2011, ICANN knowingly and purposefully embraced an unprecedented policy that will encourage filtering, blocking, and/or redirecting entire virtual neighborhoods, i.e., “top-level domains” (TLDs). Specifically, ICANN approved the creation of the “.XXX” suffix, intended for pornography websites. Although the owner of the new .XXX TLD deems a designated virtual enclave for morally controversial material to be socially beneficial for the Internet, this claim obfuscates the dangers such a policy creates under the hood.

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In response to the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s recent Further Notice of Inquiry on the Internet Assigned Names and Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions [Docket No. 110207099-1319-0], I submitted the following comment:

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My third FCC Technical Advisory Council meeting (3-hr. video archive here) was the most exciting yet. The TAC’s Critical Legacy Transition working group, studying the legacy public switched telephone network, recommended that the Council advise the FCC to set a concrete date to sunset (shut down) the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). (!) The working group recommended the year 2018 as a starting point for lively discussion.

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Although the outcome is not good news, it is gratifying to see the predictions of a model of the Internet ecosystem being validated by the real world. Specifically, the recent spate of ISP consolidations is precisely what our network formation model predicts. First, Level3 acquired Global Crossing in a deal valued at $3B. A few months later, Centurylink (QWEST) acquired Savvis for $2.5B. Our model predicts that this consolidation will continue unless ailing tier-1 providers find a new source of revenue to compensate for their losses on IP transit.

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On June 8 2011 a group of content providers, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, are going to dual-stack their content, in an event called World IPv6 Day. This trial will enable content providers to gain experience with increased levels of IPv6 traffic and gauge the extent and effect of broken dual-stack end-users. CAIDA is cooperating with RIPE NCC’s measurements on this day, providing a dozen Ark monitors to increase the number of vantage points from which RIPE will actively test a set of dual-stacked websites for levels of IPv6 support: existence of AAAA records; ping/ping6 response; traceroute/traceroute6; and HTTP reachability.

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The final report for our workshop on Active Internet Measurements (ISMA 2011 AIMS-3) is available for viewing. The abstract:

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[Executive Summary from our annual report for 2010.]

This annual report covers CAIDA’s activities in 2010, summarizing highlights from our research, infrastructure, data-sharing and outreach activities. Our current research projects span topology, routing, traffic, economics, and policy. Our infrastructure activities support several measurement-based studies of the Internet’s core infrastructure, with focus on the health and integrity of the global Internet’s topology, routing, addressing, and naming systems.

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In light of available data on global IPv6 deployment, ISPs, and those who build equipment for them, have already accepted that multi-level network address translation (NAT, between IPv4 and IPv6 networks) is here for the foreseeable future, with all its limits on end-to-end reachability and application functionality, and its required unscalable per-protocol hacks. Whether “carrier-grade” NAT (CGN) technology supports a transition to IPv6 or becomes the endgame itself is irrelevant to the planning horizon of public companies, who must now develop sustainable business models that accommodate, if not support, IPv4 scarcity. I’ve heard a few notable predicted outcomes from engineers in the field.

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I recently remotely attended my second meeting of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council (slides but no video archives). The chairs of four working groups created at the first TAC meeting (Critical Transitions; IPv6; Broadband Infrastructure Deployment; and Sharing Opportunities) presented their interim results. The FCC then issued a set of “TAC recommendations” (which the TAC never saw); it is mostly a wish list from industry to the FCC. Ironically, IPv6 did not appear anywhere in the recommendations, despite being the most popular topic at the first TAC meeting last November, and despite us running out of IPv4 addresses since the last TAC meeting. But the TAC’s IPv6 WG did commit to (on slide 53) delivering a report by November 2011 on what the FCC could or should do to help promote IPv6 deployment. Specifically, the WG has the following charter:

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In pursuit of more rigorous data on IPv6 deployment, CAIDA has undertaken four IPv6 measurement and analysis exercises: address allocation data; traceroute-based topology; DNS queries from root servers; and a global survey of network operators in 2008.

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