Kurtis's Blog

I am currently in Hyderabad, attending the Internet Governance Forum, IGF. With hours before the official opening, it might be worth reflecting a bit on Internet Governance and the general discussion on the role of international policy and ICT.

I have several times before said, and written, that the real difference that governments could make (assuming that Governance is in relation to Governing) in Internet policy is close to their traditional roles. Create harmonized legislation, give tools for law-enforment agencies such as co-operative agreements, agreeing on a framework for recognition of ccTLD ownership. All of these are issues where governments can make a difference, but they are also hard issues to deal with.

Instead of the above issues, governments have for a long time rather talked about control of various technical components of the core infrastructure systems of the Internet. My guess have always been that these ended up as the focus as they are easier to grasp and the discussions don't require governments to make has hard decisions, tradeoffs, de-regulation and regulation of local markets. However, I also believe that this is about to change. We are also seeing the first signs of governments starting to pay a lot more attention to resource allocation, availability and security. By resources here I mean everything from IP addresses, domain-name policies (i.e not TLDs) as well as standardization.

All of the above resources are starting to have an impact on the success of local businesses, and the domination, success and influence that local business are having. The level of government involvement in these issues varies from country to country and partly based on political system. However, that these issues are becoming more important I have no doubt.

Given the increased importance given to these issues by some governments, it worries me that other governments seems to step down their involvement. The recent and tragic events in Mumbai have meant that several country delegation have abstained from attending the IGF here in Hyderabad, most notably these are European country delegations. While that can perhaps be explained, the general down-playing of these issues in countries such as Sweden really worries me. Governments needs to be aware, and educated on the issues, and also show they are taking these issues seriosuly. Currently many of the developing countries seems to take the ICT policy issues much more seriously than the developed countries. The developing countries of course also have a lot more to gain in furthering their policy positions, on behalf of developed countries. I don't necessarily disagree with this development, but I would much rather that it happened in a dialog with the developed countries rather than on walk-over.

Looking forward, I believe that the ICT policy field and the access to resources to full-fill nation-state policy and support the development of local resources, content and business, will be an international policy field equally important as other resource availability policies such as oil, mineral etc. In this light I can only hope that ICT policy is upleveled, included in national foreign policy, security policy analysis and addressed on a ministerial level.

Listening to the IGF panel on "Access", I was surprised to hear Ms Jacquelynn Ruff, Vice President, International Public Policy and Regulatory Affairs, from Verizon praise the usefulness of Internet Exchange Points, and their importance for developing networks. I am surprised because Verizon is one of the Tier-1 operators, and make money from transit revenues. That said though, Verizon is unique among many of the other Tier-1 providers as they normally have local ASes that do connect to IXPs, but they have also peered with some of their "large regional" ASes (i.e European at least) in the past.

Anyway, I agree with the statement and applaud the comments!

The IGF is allegedly 1500 delegates split into 5 parallel tracks. In other words the same as a large IETF meeting. The difference is that at IETFs we have working audio, working presentation video and working Internet access. This is organized by the organization (ITU-T) that is aspiring to take control of the Internet. I hope it's not symptomatic....

Listening to several of the discussions here at the IGF (So far), my post from yesterday seems to be close to what the focus of this meeting is, control and access to resources. Yesterday I highlighted areas of Governance where Governments actually could help, and make difference. Admittedly, that is not all the aspects of governance though. In his speech yesterday, Dr Hamadoun I. Touré, the Secretary General of the ITU mentioned a possible role for the ITU in the control of the ccTLDs. Dr Touré also brought up a problem that apparently the country of Trinidad and Tobago have with their ccTLD. Googling didn't give me any clues as to what that issue might be (I must admit that I haven't been following this), but Dr Touré alluded to problems with control of their ccTLD.

Dr Touré's comments also hinted to the ITU being in control of the ccTLD allocations, somehow would help resolve these issues. Now, I must say I would dispute this somewhat.

The first issue is to identify who is the rightful owner of a particular ccTLD. Some countries that are members of the ITU has outsourced, sold or given registry control over their ccTLD to private enterprises, and are trying to retain control of these ccTLDs. In these cases, the issue of control boils down to contractual analysis and arbitration, which is best done in courts and arbitration systems. Something that the ITU is not.

Second is the question on who constitutes the rightful representation of a country. The commonly and admittedly easiest definition is to use whoever has the UN membership representation. Unfortunately though, that does not make the situation easier. First of all we have existing ccTLDs like .TW (I guess some would argue that is a gTLD, but anyway), that if it where up to the ITU would disappear or be moved under the control of China. It's also not uncommon to have territories or countries where the status might be unclear, Kosovo and South-Ossetia comes to mind. Last, we have countries where the representation might be unclear, like Iraq during the war, Somalia, etc. the UN membership rules does not provide any guidance on the topic either

Article 3

The original Members of the United Nations shall be the states which, having participated in the United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco, or having previously signed the Declaration by United Nations of 1 January 1942, sign the present Charter and ratify it in accordance with Article 110.

Article 4

1. Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.

2. The admission of any such state to membership in the United
Nations will be effected by a decision of the General Assembly upon the
recommendation of the Security Council.

Article 5

A Member of the United Nations against which preventive or enforcement action has been taken by the Security Council may be suspended from the exercise of the rights and privileges of membership by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council. The exercise of these rights and privileges may be restored by the Security Council.

Article 6

A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.

Currently the IANA function of ICANN handles the vetting process and the analysis of control of a ccTLD. It's hard to see why this would become easier under ITU. The ITU does not have more information available than IANA does. It could be argued that the problem space lies the fact that changes to the root-zone has to be approved by the US Dept. of Commerce. I would sympathize with this view, but again - the ITU is in no way a solution to this problem. The problem goes from having one national state having control over the ownership vetting of ccTLDs to a treaty based organization having control, an organization that is structured so it isn't even capable of reflecting the current Internet reality.

Writing this I am sitting in the session on "ICANN after the JPA" at the IGF. Many panelists here argue that the JPA should simply be allowed to expire. This is certainly an interesting idea, and I am somewhat attracted to it. However, I don't think that ICANN as it is at the moment is ripe for taking the control, and I believe that we are still quite far away from a stable organization. I think that if I had to make up my mind today I would say the long-term goal should be a self-supporting, freestanding ICANN with an expired JPA. But to get there I think ICANN still needs to support of the US GOV, but perhaps a relaxed wording of the JPA, perhaps even the US GOV stepping back and just exercising oversight of the ICANN processes and not the actual content.

But I don't think the situation for ccTLDs will improve with ITU. On the contrary....

Today at the IGF, I sat on the panel for discussions on IPv4 to IPv6 transition. The statement I wanted to make was below, but it was apparently a bit long as I got cut.

Thank you Madam Chair, Ladies and gentlemen, good morning

I'd like to share with you some of the issues, and developments from an operational and operator perspective with regard to the transition from Internet Protocol version 4, IPv4 to Internet Protocol version 6, IPv6. These protocols are not interoperable, but can be run in parallel. For an every day user, this means that if you only have access to IPv4 or only IPv6 and try to reach content available only in the other protocol, this will not work. But more on the issues of transition later. First of all, why would we need this, and what are the underlying issues. Simply put, the original design of the Internet, was not meant to scale to the size of today. Luckily however, the Internet architecture allows for each layer in the architecture to change or be replaced - but perhaps not as easily as originally thought.

But let's first look at what the obstacles are for migration, from a provider point of view. The most often cited obstacle is that there is no customer demand, customers want to run peer-to-peer applications and access web-sites. They have no notion of IP transport and don't really care - and shouldn't have to. IPv6 does not enable new services that can't be delivered today, but it does address the upcoming shortage of IPv4 addresses.

So what are operators doing? Deployment of IPv6 capable equipment is, and should be incremental as operators are procuring and deploying new hardware and software in their normal upgrade cycles. The reason for this, obviously, is lack of demand from customers that means there is no added revenue, therefor requirements for forced upgrades and/or change in order to deploy IPv6 will make no economical sense, at least in the short term.

Further, operators in developed as well as the developing world more or less face the same challenges, lack of commercial drivers and faced with upgrades. The same applies to the end-users, enterprises and residential equipment. In the developed world we face the upgrade of software and in worst case hardware for computers and further all cable-TV modems, DSL-modems, home gateways, firewalls etc. Here it might even be that the developing world will be at an advantage.

Current core equipment however, i.e equipment used in the backbone, that operators are procuring and to some extent already using, is supporting IPv6. Issues that remain and is becoming urgent is operational experience, and "debugging" of software and configurations. Also, building field experience will show what operational management tools are needed to be developed, or migrated to IPv6 support. In our deployment we found that while products supported IPv6 as in forwarding of packets, they often lack in parity when it comes to operationally needed tools. Vendor pricing, in the form of extra charges for IPv6 support, has also not helped in the deployment. But here there are positive signs.

In order to cater for a scenario where operators have migrated their core networks, but where endusers might still be on legacy equipment running IPv4, or for customers on an IPv6 network wanting to access content that is still only available on IPv4, the Internet Engineering Task Force, IETF - the Internet standards organization, is working on technology for bridging the two protocols.

Currently, the most pressing need is to get products for customer premises equipment, that supports IPv6. DSLmodems, cable-modems, middleboxes etc are the most urgent category that needs to get IPv6 support, and so far IPv6 support in this area has been very poor. The good news is that it seems vendors are starting to realize they are the last component to provide IPv6 support. With this, and with the back-office system vendors starting to complete migrations to IPv6 support, the operator networks are migrated.

Most day-to-day modern software, supports IPv6. Enterprise applications might still need to be migrated, but even here there are positive signs as software vendors are upgrading their products. Legacy applications will however be around for the foreseeable future, which is another driver for providers and the IETF to work on technology to support them in parallel and in bridging them to an IPv6 enabled world.

The bridging features between IP4 and IPv6 will be a crucial component in a fast, and smooth deployment to IPv6, both for providers and end-users. And hopefully, will also take away some of the contention around the run out of IPv4 addresses.

So, in these economically uncertain times, will operators be willing to bear the cost of the migration? As the investments needed are mostly taken as part of the normal upgrades cycles, that will be less of an issue. Training and operational maintenance will indeed be costs, but on going training is part of operators planning in any case. Where costs might have to be incurred is on the software side, where systems might have to be upgraded or replaced. But again, I would argue that it is hard to separate true cost of migration from normal upgrade cycles. And much has been upgraded as part of the on going upgrade cycles. For the end users and enterprises, the migration and investments will be slower, which is again why a translation technology will be needed, and is being worked on.

Last, so is there any active mass deployments? Many are deploying in their core networks, and working on customer facing systems as well as back-office systems. But one real example is FreeTelecom in France, that by the fact they are provisioning their own own CPE equipment, could enable IPv6 for all of their 3 million subscribers. In a first step limited deployment, it's available free of charge to their triple-play customers, of which 250,000 customers have actively asked to enabled it. Which in relation to the total of 3 million users, might seem like a small number, but on a global scale it is a stunning number. So there is indeed deployment starting to happen.

Thank you!

Local news media here in India has had some press coverage of the IGF. At the opening presentations of under-secretary general, state and union ministers, the photographers where hard at work. But the photo that made it into the local news paper was something else...

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I managed to get quoted in the Hindu Times today, based on the session yesterday. Unfortunately the reporter misunderstood the statements we where making. Which I guess you saw in my written statement yesterday, and also in the official transcript of the session. I today sent an email to the news-paper highlighting some disagreement with their reporting

Dear Sirs,

I read the article from the Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, reporting on the IPv4 to IPv6 transition discussion at http://www.hindu.com/2008/12/06/stories/2008120656791500.htm. Let me first thank you for taking the time, and allowing editorial space for a report from this important event, for the development of the Internet. The adoption of IPv6 is of utmost importance for the continued success of the Internet, and I personally strongly support this and have for many years worked on this.

However, I am afraid your reporter misunderstood my statements and has reported the opposite view point of what I actually stated. As can be seen in the official transcripts at http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/hyderabad_prog/Transition%20from%20IPv4%20to%20IPv6.html, what I actually said was, and I quote,

"So what are the operators doing on this? Deployment of the IPv6-capable equipment in the core networks, in the operators' networks, is happening incrementally as the operators go and procure new equipment, deploying hardware or software as part of their normal upgrade cycles.".

So I have a hard time understanding where the reporter got the statement:

"Deployment of the IPv6-capable equipment in the core networks was a costly proposition. " from. As I note above, on the contrary, the upgrades will be included in the normal upgrade cycles that operators are doing due to customer growth and traffic increase.

I would be more than happy to offer your paper a longer interview or statement on the issue of IPV6 adoption and what is happening in the rest of the world if you believe this would be in the interest to your readers.

However, not to put blame on the Hindu Times, it's a hard topic to fully understand if it's the first time you deal with it. However, the open discussion in the afternoon was good and clarifying the issues. If you are interested in what I said, just search for "Kurtis Lindqvist".

As several of my friends have already mentioned, the Swedish government yesterday gave an extra allocation of money to the regulator to be used in order to secure good time production in Sweden. The press release does indeed mention that Netnod, where I work during my day job is one of the cornerstones of the distribution of time in Sweden.

Few countries and telcos have realized the importance of accurate time and frequency. In the old POTS days, the PTTs often paid alot of attention to the production of time and frequency, as that was a cornerstone in their transport (SDH/SONET) networks, and GPS was not yet available.

Today however, most telcos use GPS receivers, often cheap ones, for their time and frequency production. These receivers are actually not very good, the GPS system itself is vulnerable, and the accuracy is also not top notch. That we in Sweden for a long time has had access to high quality time, research and availability in a production environment is important. It's sad though, that this is not discussed more and that not more people show interest in the topics. We also need to work with the government on the outcome of the government study, to ensure that we can continue to have high-quality and production grade time and frequency. As well as work harder on making sure that providers have access to these services.