Reliance on IPv4 May Make ISPs Address Brokers, RIR Official Says
How the world navigates the IPv4 “exhaustion mess” will “set the direction of the next few decades of the Internet,” said Geoff Huston, chief scientist for Asia Pacific regional Internet registry APNIC. This is a “major pivot point” for the ongoing tension between carriage and content in communications, he told us. So far, the Internet has “bred massive content industries at the expense of the fortunes of the carrier folk,” but if Internet companies persist in using IPv4, carriers may find themselves in a new role -- brokering Internet Protocol addresses between content providers and users, he said.
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If transition to IPv6 had been completed as originally hoped in the 1990s, moving from the legacy to the new Internet Protocol now would have been far easier and potentially much cheaper, Huston said. Now that IPv4 addresses have run out, the industry “must contemplate various forms of ‘life extension’ mechanisms for IPv4,” principally via carrier-grade network address translation (NAT), “no matter what else we do,” he said. It’s too late to avoid the issue by “turning on the IPv6 switch,” he said.
There are three basic approaches to making IPv4 addresses last longer, Huston said: “reclaim and reuse”; use existing allocations of addresses more efficiently; and “overload” addresses by putting multiple clients and/or servers on a single public IP address. The first option is based on the observation that around 23 percent of the allocated IPv4 space can’t be “seen” as reachable space in the public Internet. It’s said that those approximately 1 billion addresses could, if used efficiently, give 4-5 more years on IPv4, he said. But various attempts over the years to contact address holders and confirm that they still need their addresses haven’t freed up any significant number of addresses, he said.
Many ISPs have been performing a sweep of the address usage to try for more efficiency, Huston said. This might involve renumbering internal links into private address space, or paring the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) pool to the bare minimum, as well as similar measures aimed at having the addresses used by customers rather than sitting unused in pools, he said. Wikipedia defines DHCP as a network protocol used to configure devices connected to a network so the website can communicate on that network using IP, such as personal home local area networks.
Carrier-grade NATs involve putting multiple clients behind a single IP address or a single pool of addresses, effectively allowing the public IP address to be shared by many clients, Huston said. On the server side, there’s now widespread use of virtual hosting, where a single server IP address is shared across many Web services, with all the Web service domain names being essentially virtual hosts located behind a single server. However, there are “real issues” with this approach, said Huston. If the “reputation” of an online service depends on the integrity and reputation of its fellow websites, and if one of its co-tenants on the IP address ends up with a poor reputation, an IP address-level block could be put in place, he said. The bottom line is that forms of address-sharing in IPv4 are “really the only approach we have to making IPv4 last longer,” he said.
Organizations are increasingly turning to the purchase and leasing of IPv4 addresses from companies that don’t need them (CD May 16 p13). Asked if that concerns him, Huston said that there are still people who need addresses. New secure Web services should use unique IP addresses, and even carrier-grade NATs need addresses, he said. What has “run out” is the current method of handing out previously unallocated addresses, he said. As in many other markets, where there’s demand there’s supply, and in this case matching the two takes the form of a secondary market for IPv4 addresses. The issue is to preserve the network’s integrity and the uniqueness of addresses by safeguarding the integrity of address registries, he said.
The question is how the results of leasing and sales transactions get reflected in the registries, Huston said: What is the registry’s role in this environment? How is “good registry practice” followed, he asked. The IP addressing community is mulling those issues, one aspect of which is needs-based IPv4 address allocation, he said.
"These are critical issues for the Internet,” and their resolutions will set its direction for the next few decades, Huston said. Relegating the carriage industry to “mere low margin undistinguished conduit providers” has been fiercely resisted by carriers, to little effect so far, he said. But if the Internet continues to use IPv4, carriers will become brokers between content providers and users, he said. “Far more than anything ICANN does or does not do, far more than anything the ITU does and does not do, the way industry moves in the coming few years over IPv4 exhaustion will determine the future of the Internet in very fundamental ways.”
If one likes the ascent of over-the-top content players such as Google and Netflix, then “you desperately want the entire industry to get moving with IPv6,” Huston said. If that doesn’t happen, it will be torn down by carriage providers as they “inevitably rebuild the old telco-like business models and impose them upon the future IPv4 Internet,” he said.