The threat to universal Internet connectivity

Sclavos strongly implies that the existing system of technical standards committees has broken down and that individual players and new entities must take the lead in defining and investing in the next generation of Internet capabilities, including an intelligent core.

Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld DOWNLOAD PDF Click here to download InfoWorld's special report: Internet connectivity trouble

“The Internet is growing faster than maybe the standards [bodies] can keep up,” Sclavos says. “We’re going to get back to the world of the 1980s and early 1990s, migrate back toward a healthy tension between vendor-driven standards and community ones.”

Standards committees to the rescue?

Whether the Internet technical community can succeed in preserving decentralized innovation based on end-to-to-end protocols may hinge on the fate of standards such as IPv6, an entirely new Internet addressing architecture designed to replace IPv4, the current worldwide standard.

A poster child for next-generation Internet protocols, IPv6 would presumably render NATs unnecessary, providing a much broader pool of available IP addresses and thereby unifying balkanized user communities on a single platform. Together with a related protocol called DNSSec (DNS Security), it would facilitate additional security capabilities, such as encryption and authentication, that anyone could leverage.

The question is whether these architectural protocols can move from committee approval to broad adoption before proprietary solutions not designed for end-to-end adoption take hold.

“Deployment is the hard part, … the actual adoption,” ICANN’s Crocker explains. “What happens in the Internet is the protocols get decided on in a consensus process, and then the adoption of those protocols is done by individuals or individual organizations. … Things either develop a following, or they don’t.”

Crocker notes that there’s a natural resistance to adopting protocols such as IPv6 that add overhead cost to the system. “It adds both computational cost and storage,” he explains. “The data takes more space in the registries, and the generating and checking of the signatures takes computation time, and the responses are bigger and take more transmission.”

Although IPv6 has gotten early traction in educational institutions and in countries such as China that have severe address shortages under the IPv4 system, it faces significant hurdles in the United States.

“That whole product upgrade cycle is likely to be very complex. Everything has to be changed. It will probably take government driving IPv6,” Symantec’s Clyde says. “I don’t think industry alone feels any overwhelming compelling need to do it.” 

In this context, VeriSign’s Sclavos, who also supports IPv6 deployment, is largely unapologetic about VeriSign’s rebuffed attempt at unilateral innovation with the Site Finder service.

“The Internet is the only place in the world where we wait for people to knock down our doors before we take action,” Sclavos says, arguing that a faster adoption mechanism is needed so the Internet can meet impending needs and threats. He also claims that VeriSign has been a reliable steward of the DNS infrastructure, investing more than $100 million in the system, even during a down economy, and delivering 100 percent availability for six years.

“[VeriSign’s] been very vocal about saying that it’s important to be able to innovate at the core,” ICANN’s Crocker says. “And nobody has convinced them that what they did was wrong. Anyone with an engineering background looks at the idea of hastily fielded changes put in and says this is not a good thing. Here’s a major player that took action on its own. Is that the way we want to do things?”

Sclavos says that if VeriSign had the launch to do over, “we would come out much earlier with broad-based information about the changes” the service would impart.

“Next time, we would create a best-practices model about how we would roll out new services that are more complete,” Sclavos says. “There are some fringe things that broke, and we probably could have been better about getting the news out earlier.”

As ICANN’s Crocker notes, one thing’s for sure: The Site Finder episode “got a lot more people involved in these questions than had been.”

Correction

In this article, the original version of the chart "Internet Traffic Climbing Fast" incorrectly listed totals of daily queries to the Internet's DNS from 1994 to 2003. The chart has been corrected.