The Internet was deliberately designed as a simple common substrate packet-switched network that could be able to support a huge variety of digital service profiles. The Internet's service profile was defined in the connecting devices at the edge, and not in the switching equipment in the middle of the network. The network model was intentionally so sparse that it was incapable of becoming ossified! How's that turned out?
There has been a major change in the landscape of the internet over the past few years with the progressive introduction of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I’d like to look at where we are up to with the deployment of QUIC on the public Internet. In so doing we also need to consider whether the DNS is ossifying in front of our eyes!
There has been a major change in the landscape of the internet over the past few years with the progressive introduction of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I’d like to look at where we are up to with the deployment of QUIC on the public Internet. In so doing we also need to consider whether the DNS is ossifying in front of our eyes!
I want to look at just one day of the operation of the Internet’s BGP network by looking at the behaviour of a single BGP session. Nothing special or extraordinary happened on that day. There were no large-scale power blackouts, no major faults in the world’s submarine cable network, nor in the terrestrial trunk cable systems. No headlining-grabbing cyber attack took place on that day, as far as I’m aware. It was just an ordinary Thursday on the Internet, just like any other day, and I selected this day due to its very ordinariness! WhAt can this day tell us about BGP and the way we use it?
I want to look at just one day of the operation of the Internet’s BGP network by looking at the behaviour of a single BGP session. Nothing special or extraordinary happened on that day. There were no large-scale power blackouts, no major faults in the world’s submarine cable network, nor in the terrestrial trunk cable systems. No headlining-grabbing cyber attack took place on that day, as far as I’m aware. It was just an ordinary Thursday on the Internet, just like any other day, and I selected this day due to its very ordinariness! WhAt can this day tell us about BGP and the way we use it?
I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions, or in other words, an examination of the resilience of the RPKI infrastructure.
I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions, or in other words, an examination of the resilience of the RPKI infrastructure.
The way we've organised the Internet's routing system seems to be just too informal, too anarchic and too unstable to form the foundation of the world’s communication system. Yet, here we are. And, surprisingly, it works! Well, it mostly works, most of the time. From time to time anomalous things happen. In this article I’d like to analyse just one of the instances when things didn’t go according to plan, showing how the routing anomaly was visible, and how it could be mitigated.
The way we've organised the Internet's routing system seems to be just too informal, too anarchic and too unstable to form the foundation of the world’s communication system. Yet, here we are. And, surprisingly, it works! Well, it mostly works, most of the time. From time to time anomalous things happen. In this article I’d like to analyse just one of the instances when things didn’t go according to plan, showing how the routing anomaly was visible, and how it could be mitigated.
William Stanley Jevons was one of the founders of neoclassical economics in the mid-nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the great railway mania of the mid 19th century he observed that the total consumption of coal had actually increased when technological progress improved the efficiency of steam engines. Jevons Paradox observes that that improvements in efficiency of resource utilisation can act as a positive incentive to increased resource consumption, exceeding the reductions that would be anticipated due to this greater efficiency. How does this relate to the Internet and the current issues relating to Internet Centrality?
William Stanley Jevons was one of the founders of neoclassical economics in the mid-nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the great railway mania of the mid 19th century he observed that the total consumption of coal had actually increased when technological progress improved the efficiency of steam engines. Jevons Paradox observes that that improvements in efficiency of resource utilisation can act as a positive incentive to increased resource consumption, exceeding the reductions that would be anticipated due to this greater efficiency. How does this relate to the Internet and the current issues relating to Internet Centrality?
The recent erratic moves by the US President to initiate a trade war on a global scale will have far-reaching implications beyond stock markets and will inevitably include the digital world and what we refer to as Internet Governance. The US moves on the unilateral imposition of tariffs can be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in global trade and open markets by the US, and a resurgence of a theme of strategic national self-reliance in all areas of economic activity, including the digital realm. The tenets of Multi-Stakeholderism, the foundation of Internet Governance, are crumbling.
The recent erratic moves by the US President to initiate a trade war on a global scale will have far-reaching implications beyond stock markets and will inevitably include the digital world and what we refer to as Internet Governance. The US moves on the unilateral imposition of tariffs can be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in global trade and open markets by the US, and a resurgence of a theme of strategic national self-reliance in all areas of economic activity, including the digital realm. The tenets of Multi-Stakeholderism, the foundation of Internet Governance, are crumbling.
One of the more active areas of activity at the IETF falls under the remit of the DNS Operations Working Group. These days the Internet is to all intents and purposes a name-based network. Our framework for supporting rendezvous, authenticity, and encryption is based on this name infrastructure. Little wonder that the DNS has engendered so much attention in the IETF.
The Root Zone of the DNS is "special" in that it is the critical component that glues the rest of the distributed database that is the Internet's Name SYstem into a coherent whole. So how's it going? And more importantly, how will we scale it up to meet the demands of an inexorably larger Internet in the future?
The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) brings together DNS service operators, DNS software implementors, and researchers together to share concerns, information and learn together about the operation and evolution of the DNS. They meet between two or three times a year in a workshops format. The most recent workshop was held in Atlanta, in February 2025. Here are my thoughts on some of the material that was presented and discussed at this workshop where too much DNS is barely enough!
The dominant theme of the presentations this time around at NANOG 93 was the combination of automation of network command and control and the application of Artificial Intelligence tools to this control function. The interest in AI appears to have heightened of late, and while the hype levels are impressive even for an industry that can get totally fixated on hype, the deliverables so far still appear to fall somewhat short.
The internet is held together by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Its a flooding protocol whose intended outcome is to ensure that every BGP speaker has the same information base as every other BGP speaker. What happens when this flooding algorithm fails? What happens if the information in a BGP speaker falls out of sync?
The internet is held together by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Its a flooding protocol whose intended outcome is to ensure that every BGP speaker has the same information base as every other BGP speaker. What happens when this flooding algorithm fails? What happens if the information in a BGP speaker falls out of sync?
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.