[p2p-research] is the internet going down the drain in 12-18 months?

[Samuel Rose]

On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 1:05 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This would deserve a discussion,
>
> Sepp? Olivier? Matt?
>
> Gordon Cook says this should scare us:
>

Without even reading the rest of it: the first thing we should not do
is be scared :-)



>
> http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/apr/01/six-easy-steps-avert-collapse-civilization/
> • 2 months, 2 weeks ago
> For someone who has worked fulltime-plus for many years to advance the cause
> of sustainable Internet development, it was gratifying -- but also a bit
> troubling -- to hear David Eagleman's suggestion that the Internet
> represents our best hope for averting a civilizational collapse. At the
> moment, the Internet itself is on the cusp of a major evolutionary
> inflection point, after which most of the seemingly highest probability
> future development trajectories lead to states that would probably not
> satisfy Eagleman's expectations, or even live up to the expectations of
> today's non-casual Internet participant-contributors.
> That inflection point will arrive in appx. 12-18 months, when the last
> remaining reserves of unallocated IPv4 addresses will be depleted. To date,
> these protocol number resources have served as the fundamental logical
> "glue" holding the Internet together, and enabling the 35k or so
> independently administered Internet networks to seamlessly interact and
> exchange traffic with one another. Unfortunately, The designated successor
> address resource, called IPv6, is not backward compatible with the IPv4
> addressing standard, which means that future aspiring network operators that
> only have access to IPv6 will be perpetually isolated and unreachable from
> the rest of the Internet -- unless they can somehow secure access to IPv4
> themselves (e.g., by buying or leasing it from an "incumbent" IPv4 holder,
> or by relying on an incumbent IPv4-based network to serve as a permanent
> middleman/broker for all interactions with the rest of the built Internet).

An artificial scarcity created around IPv4 will likely quickly fall
apart, as there is already a path to converting  machines over to
IPv6. Exhaustion will affect *everyone*, and thus it is most likely
that the majority of the network will switch to IPv6. That is my take
on it.



> Today, despite the looming inevitability of IPv4 exhaustion, only about 5%
> of existing Internet networks globally are even capable of providing such a
> service.
> >From an economic standpoint, many of the causes behind this particular form
> of aggregate adaptation to the looming change could be usefully compared to
> the conditions leading up to (and that might have been anticipated by
> interested parties beforehand) the Enclosures. I don't know enough about
> neurological systems to suggest a relevant comparison by name, but I have no
> doubt that Dr. Eagleman and others could fill in that particular blank. How
> would one characterize a distributed processing system in which established
> system-wide, mesh-like interactions are gradually canalized/partitioned into
> and superceded by less flexible/variable, more linear/serial, and more
> narrowly scoped interactions? How would one diagnose a learning system in
> which the possibility for (and any memory of) future learning is absolutely
> contingent on the active support of dominant subsystems that came to achieve
> that status as a result of past learning?
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Sam Rose
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