In 1998 any lingering doubts about the ultimate success of the Internet as a global communications medium had been thoroughly dispelled. The Internet was no longer just a research experiment, or an intermediate way stop on the road to adoption of the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) framework. There was nothing else left standing in the data communications landscape that could serve our emerging needs for data communications. IP was now the communications technology for the day, if not for the coming century. No longer could the traditional telecommunications enterprises view the Internet with some polite amusement or even overt derision. The Internet had arrived.
The IETF had its 116th meeting in Yokohama, Japan in the last week of March. Here’s some notes I made from some of the working group sessions I attended that I found to be of interest.
Privacy was a difficult topic for Internet protocols at the outset of the Internet. Things took a very different turn some 10 years ago following the disclosures of mass surveillence programs in the US, when the IETF declared that pervasive monitoring of users consititued at attack and Internet protocols needed to take measures to contain the way in which data was accessed in the network. The latest offerings in the area of improved privacy include Oblivious HTTP and MASQUE. Lets look at these approaches and the way that they attempt to contain the potential leakage of data.
How do you protect a submarine cable from interference? Do you use more amour plating? Or laying the cable in a sea floor trench? Or simply lay more cables? Or do you head off into radio-based systems?
What sustains a digital monopoly in today's world? It's not the amassing of a huge workforce, or even having access to large pool of capital. It's not even the use of proprietary technologies that are not accessible to others. So why isn't the Internet fulfilling its vision of profound and intense competitive pressure in every part of the digital supply chain? Whjat is sustaining the domination of the digital world by a select group of behemoths? And, can we change this picture?
OARC held a 2-day meeting in February, with a set of presentations on various DNS topics. Here’s some observations that I picked up from the presentations in that meeting.
OARC held a 2-day meeting in February, with a set of presentations on various DNS topics. Here’s some observations that I picked up from the presentations in that meeting.
The DNS is a remarkably simple system. You send it queries and you get back answers. However, the DNS is simple in the same way that Chess or Go are simple. They are all constrained environments governed by a small set of rigid rules, but they all possess astonishing complexity.
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.
The first part of this report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the routing table. Dynamic routing updates are also part of this story. If the update rate of BGP is growing faster than we can deploy processing capability to match then the routing system will lose coherence, and at that point the network will head into periods of instability. This second part of the report will look at the profile of BGP updates across 2022 to assess whether the stability of the routing system, as measured by the level of BGP update activity, is changing.
This past year marks a significant point in the evolution of the Internet where the strong growth numbers that were a constant feature of the past thirty years are simply not present in the data. The Internet’s growth is slowing down significantly. Have we got to the point of market saturation and there is no more demand capacity to fuel further growth? Or are we reeling from the combinations of a global pandemic, turmoil in energy markets and the signs of increased climate instability so that we are no longer as interested to throw more resources into more network infrastructure investment? Let’s take a look at the BGP view of 2022 and see how these larger economic and social considerations are reflected in the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system.
The Internet largely operates in a space defined by markets rather than an intricate framework of regulation. Using a lens of market dynamics and looking at the level to which market-based incentives exist for actors, is the adoption of routing security heading in the direction of market failure? If so, then how should we respond?
I was invited to participate in a session at IGF 2022 that was devoted to the workings of the DNS. I’d like to share my contribution to this session with my thoughts on where the DNS is headed.
Many aspects of the digital environment are dominated by a small clique of extremely large enterprises. Meta and Twitter may be teetering at the moment, but we have Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon who are still strongly dominant in their respective markets. Looking further afield, what about our common infrastructure services that everyone is forced to rely upon? How's the Domain Name System faring? Is the DNS also falling under the influence of these digital hypergiants? Or is the DNS still highly distributed and resisting the trends of centralization? Lets take a look at some DNS data to see if we can answer this question.
There has been a concerted push to shroud many of the IETF's core protocols inside a claok of end-to-end encryption. This level of occlusion of the transactions that occur across the network from the network itself is not without its attendant risks, as Dr Paul Vixie outlined in a presentation at the recent NANOG 86 meeting.
QUIC could be seen as a simple update to TCP, but I think that such a vew is missing the point of QUIC. QUIC represents a significant shift in the set of transport capabilities available to applications in terms of communication privacy, session control integrity and flexibility.
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