In the last RIPE Labs article on this subject How Does the Internet Industry Compare?, we looked at ways to compare our industry with other industrial sectors, and identified a number of characteristics that an industry must have in order to be comparable to the Internet industry. It seems the financial sector or monetary credit industry shares many of these characteristics and in fact behaves much like the Internet industry. more
Looking back at 2010, here is the list of top ten most popular news, blogs, and industry news on CircleID in 2010 based on the overall readership of the posts (total views as of Jan 1, 2011). Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership and best wishes to the entire community for 2011. Happy New Year! more
The Internet Routing Registry (IRR) is a globally distributed routing information database that consists of several databases run by various organisations. Network operators use the IRR to publish their routing policies and routing announcements in a way that allows other network operators to make use of the data. In addition to making Internet topology visible, the IRR is used by network operators to look up peering agreements, determine optimal policies and to configure their routers. more
In an earlier CircleID post (The ISP Industry: Concentrated or Diverse?) we discussed if the ISP industry is concentrated and concluded the industry is amazingly open and varied. This time we try to identify criteria that make other economic sectors comparable to our own industry, using the global automotive manufacturing sector as an example to test our assumptions. Comparing the Internet industry with other industries is interesting, because it is quite special in a number of ways: it is transparent, keeps detailed records and values a high level of industry self-regulation. It also enables organisations to serve a global market. more
An industry professional at Abusix is the backbone behind a proposal to improve and create better mitigation of abuse across different global internet networks. Basically, this introduces a mandatory "abuse contact" field for objects in global Whois databases. This provides a more efficient way for abuse reports to reach the correct network contact. Personally - as a Postmaster for a leading, white-label ISP, I applaud this with great happiness for multiple reasons. I also feel people who handle abuse desks, anti-abuse roles, etc. should closely follow this. more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has failed on a number of fronts, resulting in sub-par products and services in a global monopolistic environment. Failures will continue if not recognized and immediately addressed. Leadership is about the future, a journey into uncharted territory, and it requires vision supported by technical, operational, and mind-changing competencies. ... It does not require a rocket scientist to recognize that ICANN has fallen short because it lacks... more
Brokenness refers to the situation whereby a website is made accessible in dual stack, meaning both IPv4 and IP6, using records referred to as A's for IPv4 and quad A's for IPv6. Some end-users can experience slower access to the website or in some rarer instances no access at all. Brokenness is mostly attributable to older versions of the Mac Os operating system... The brokenness issue has been very well described by Eric Vyncke... more
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is hosting a workshop today discussing the state of IPv6 in the U.S. and its impact on the industry, government, and the Internet economy. The moderators for the workshop are Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer of the United States. Participants include... more
The RIPE Database is about to enter its fourth decade. It began humbly as a place to store network and contact information back when the RIPE community formed in 1989. When the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (NCC) was created three years later and started to assign and allocated IP address space, the database was expanded to include the registration of more detailed network and routing information. more
Larry Seltzer writes: Politico? Comcast's PR gets an 'A' for this article, an upbeat tech-lite description of the impending depletion of the IPv4 space and efforts to adopt IPv6. It also seems that the Obama administration is behind this, and that the Federal government has had "remarkable foresight on this issue." I feel better already. more
At the IGF2010 in Vilnius, two folk are floating a trial balloon about separating the allocation function from the registry services function. Currently, these functions are seen as indivisible by the Internet addressing community. In other words, one gets an allocation or assignment from a RIR and the RIR adds the assignment to their database... The question being asked is "Is it time for a split between allocation and services for Internet number resources as was the case for domain name resources?" My answer is no more
We are at the height of vacation season here in the Netherlands, and the RIPE NCC headquarters in Amsterdam are quieter than usual. The downtime has given me a chance to reflect on how the recent economic downturn has affected our membership growth. The good news is that it hasn't. more
As the first semester of 2010 comes to a close, the IPv4 address pool has dropped to 6%. Another year and we will probably celebrate (mourn?) the end of the IANA IPv4 pool. As Vint Cerf commented on the topic of depletion in an e-mail to Bob Hinden: 'Sic transit Gloria Mundi'. The view of an abyss or the fear of judgment day always focuses attention and as a result IPv6 adoption is finally picking up speed. The Google invitational IPv6 Conference in Mountain View clearly illustrated the point. more
The last remaining stocks disappear from the shelves more quickly than ever before . . . IPv4 addresses that is. As the ARIN met in Toronto in April, an inordinate amount of time was spent yet again debating proposals on how to handle the dwindling stock of IPv4 addresses. I get the distinct impression that some people will still be tabling proposals and discuss the issue long after the last IPv4 block has been allocated by IANA and even the RIR's themselves. more
OECD, Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, has released a report for policy makers assessing the level of IPv6 deployment around the world. "[T]he timely deployment of IPv6 by network operators and content/application providers is an increasing priority for all Internet stakeholders. In terms of public policy, IPv6 plays an important role in enabling growth of the Internet to support further innovation. In addition, security, interoperability and competition issues are involved with the depletion of IPv4." more