Comment on the Proposal to allocate IPv6 address by nation states
Delivered at 
Internet Governance Task Force of Japan (IGTF-J)
November 24, 2004

[Note: This is a provisional paper, not final]

Thank you Chairman. As an observer, on "onlooker" I like to congratulate the WGIG members to tackle the very important and complicated task of finding our mutual solutions and consensus.

IGTF-J is a joint group by the Japanese Internet Community and Industry to help achieve safe and trusted global framework of Internet operation and application through maintaining and developing private sector-led management of Internet.

Today I like to focus on just one issue, which, we think, shows a very good example of what kind of challenges we are all facing.

Mr. Houlin Zhao of ITU TSB circulated a paper a few weeks ago that includes a proposal to allocate a portion of IPv6 address thorough ITU to the nation states, and let the governments manage them as a dual system operating concurrently with the current system operated by the Regional Internet Registries, RIRs. 

This proposal prompted us to carry out some quick but interesting simulation in Tokyo before coming here, and we come up with the following analysis that we like to share with the respected members of WGIG and all the stakeholders interested in this issue.

There are two factors we need to consider: One is that of technical requirements and another is of Management scheme requirements.

1 Technical requirements to allocate IPv6 Address
Internet Protocol (IP) has two distinct technical characteristics in terms of addressing: 
1) address length is fixed, and 
2) Every packet has an embedded address, which is required for connectionless communication. 

This means, in order to change the address system the protocols must also be changed fundamentally. Therefore, in order to use a protocol as long as possible, maximum care should be taken to guarantee the availability of IP addresses indefinitely for all users who want to communicate.

Many people tend to forget the importance of conservation of address resources for IPv6. However, IPv6 is not different from IPv4 in terms of fixed address length. IPv6 address resources are vast but not infinite, and their practical availability is far lower than the theoretical maximum. 

Care should also be taken for preservation of an operational routing system. Routing aggregation is essential in order to ensure global routability. Excessive fragmentation of IpV6 address space will cause a failure of the routing system resulting in discontinuation of services to many parts of the Internet. This would especially affect small network operators who will suffer unsustainable cost increase due to increasingly expensive routers.

Second, there are management scheme requirements issues to satisfy these technical requirements.
Currently, IP address management is mainly carried out by four RIRs. Should a new and different management scheme be introduced in the future, that new scheme must satisfy the technical requirements just mentioned as much as the current RIR framework.  We think any method that has the potential to undermine these requirements must be avoided.

The most important policy in allocation of IP address space is fairness, not to promote competition. Allocation standards must be kept globally uniform, regardless of the region or property of user organizations. In case there are plural bodies that provide address allocation services, the difference in allocation standards must not become elements of competition which is what Mr. Zhao's proposal intend to offer. 

3. Perceived characters of Nation-state based addressing
Let's assume that IP addresses are allocated by nation states. This may enable easy recognition of some users' nationality/locale and enable attractive services such as automatic traffic segmentations or prioritized processing but it will also enable questionable applications such as easy censorship, tracking or restriction of communication content.

In any case, existing addresses already allocated (both IPv4 and IPv6) have not been allocated on a national basis, and if only some addresses are allocated in this manner, then not all IP addresses will have the same characteristics or support these new services

4. Concerns toward managing IP address by nation-states
We believe that fulfilling both Technical and Management scheme requirements are essential for IP address management even in case of the existing arrangements by RIRs. Therefore, we should not accept any risk of not meeting these conditions. 

We are much worried that we may not be able to keep consistent allocation standards in those parallel systems, including a worse case that these two systems will compete as IP address allocation service providers and result in compromise to essential standards of address management.

We do understand that national governments have serious interest in Internet governance issues including IP address allocations and that they want to protect these resources under national sovereignty perspectives, as Internet is now becoming a new social infrastructure.  However, we strongly believe that the conditions required for address management should not be constrained or limited by the interests of national sovereignties, but they should be kept and evolved to preserve the smooth functioning of Internet to be used among all the people of the world for their distribution of information and communication.

Thank you very much.

1 RIR (Regional Internet Registry), NIR (National Internet Registry) and LIR (Local Internet Registry)