Disband the ITU-T IPv6 Group

When the ITU-T IPv6 Group gets together in Geneva next week, one of the things they should discuss is the need for their very existence.

For many decades, those of us with some longevity in the information and communication technology (ICT) field have witnessed recurrent cycles of rampant protocol politics. At its worst, these debilitating cycles occur when the political concerns are not even relevant anymore.

IPv6 tutorial

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When the ITU-T IPv6 Group gets together in Geneva next week, one of the things they should discuss is the need for their very existence.

For many decades, those of us with some longevity in the information and communication technology (ICT) field have witnessed recurrent cycles of rampant protocol politics. At its worst, these debilitating cycles occur when the political concerns are not even relevant anymore.

IPv6 tutorial

The current outbreak is dubbed IPv6itis, and unfortunately it is at its worst in a venue that should know better -- the ITU-T -- which has spun up two groups that are needlessly consuming international institutional resources that could be applied instead to deal with major infrastructure issues rather than protocol trivia. Two strong arguments and some useful history are provided for a significant re-direction.

Relevancy of the mandate

At the outset, anyone dealing with this subject matter should read Laura DeNardis' book Protocol Politics, published in 2009.

It is almost entirely about IPv6, and reviews in copious but readable detail the controversial history of IPv6 since it emerged in 1994 as a reaction to controversies and politics of the time.

Although the book is oriented for the TCP/IP Internet community oriented, it does establish that IPv6 was a geek response to the Internet Architecture Board's adoption at Kobe in 1992 of the joint ITU-TISO OSI Internet protocol known as CLNP. CLNP was strongly supported by all governments (including the United States) and most of the industry at the time.

When IPv6 was finally adopted, many in industry made it clear they were not going to use the protocol. After 16 years of evangelization, the "father of the Australian Internet," Geoff Huston, who became tired of the endless IPv6 hype, published a definitive set of measurements in 2008 that demonstrated that only 0.4% of the TCP/IP traffic was IPv6. Another set of measurements done in April of this year refined the analysis that indicated a 5% capability of end-to-end IPv6 use currently exists. It is not apparent that anyone has disputed these measurements.

Anything that has only captured these low levels of market share after one and a half decades would under most circumstances qualify as a market failure. However, governments -- including via the ITU -- seem obsessed with continuing to drive IPv6 as some kind of panacea with all kinds of political spinoffs represented by the ITU-T IPv6 group. For those who watched the same governments attempt to drive the OSI Internet protocol CLNP for two decades, IPv6 is following an eerily similar path.

Ironically CLNP had a higher relative usage rate at this point than IPv6. As was experienced 20 years ago, this "top down" drive toward a particular protocol solution, notwithstanding the obvious marketplace resistance, is also due to institutional and economic momentum engendered by those who have invested in IPv6. The intent here is not to dump on IPv6, but rather to suggest that the government acting as a marketing agent for specific protocols in this circumstance seems unwise.