Owen DeLong lent his expertise and knowledge to The WHIR’s guest writer spot titled Industry Perspectives. His piece, called “Technological and Ecological Change: Five Stages of Reaction,” explores the integration and acceptance of climate change and IPv6. From the article:
Humans are creatures of habit. That people often avoid change – even when doing so is detrimental – is evident in our response to two very different situations facing us today. The first is the growth of the Internet beyond the addressing capacity of the widely-utilized second Internet Protocol (IP version 4) and our progress toward deploying the third Internet Protocol (IP version 6). The second situation is global warming. In each case, society’s reaction to these situations resembles the “Kübler-Ross” five stages of grief.
Stage 1: Denial and Isolation
Some IT professionals claim that adding more layers of NAT, recovering underused addresses, and committing various acts of magic can preserve a functional IPv4 network and avoid the need to deploy IPv6 – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. However, simple mathematics shows us that this really isn’t true. The world’s 7 billion people will someday need approximately five addresses each just for personal devices. Another five billion addresses will be needed for shared network infrastructure, bringing the required address capacity to approximately 40 billion, but the IPv4 address space provides only 3.2 billion unicast addresses.
Similar denial of mathematical reality can be seen in those who have an economic interest in avoiding carbon taxes and other environmental restrictions. First it was the existence of warming that was disputed, but when that position became untenable, it was the cause of the warming. Because the consequences (ranging from reduced biodiversity, to rising coastlines, to the literal extinction of the human race) are so daunting, denial retrenches – but persists.
Denial often comes with a hefty price tag. In the IT world, the failure of web sites and service providers to adequately deploy IPv6 by the time the IPv4 address space is exhausted will result in tremendous disruption to what has become essential infrastructure for business. Keeping the IPv4 Internet functioning without new addresses to allocate will result in reduced networking performance, reliability and usability. Some signs of this can already be seen in Europe and Asia. A quick look at how the consumer Internet is implemented in India provides a harbinger if IPv6 deployment languishes at the current pace. (Note: India is one convenient example, but not the only one.) If denial had been avoided 25 years ago (when IPv6 was released and ready to begin test deployments) the coming transition would have been a non-event.
Stage 2: Anger
There have been a number of IT professionals who have expressed anger towards IPv6 transition in forms ranging from “it’ll never happen” to inaccurate criticisms of the new protocol based not on facts, but on convenient rumors and supposition. Many of them seem to be afraid that IPv6 will render much of their existing IT knowledge obsolete. On the other hand, TV newscasts on global warming reveal a similar level of anger held by adherents on both sides of the issue.
