Tyranny of economics toxic for online users

IN A TOXIC internet environment, valuable services are being forced behind castles and fortresses – it is no longer an open Internet because, suddenly, the entry price is the price of the fortress, says leading scientist Geoff Huston . . .

While the world blissfully connects billions and more billions of devices to the Internet, Internet scientists realised way back in 1989 that the day would come when the world would run out of IP addresses.
That’s because each device requires its individual IP address to communicate with the network.  And the global Internet IP system is literally running out of addresses.
As far back as 2011, a secondary market emerged selling a single IP address for US$10, observes Geoff Huston, described by some as the “father” of the Internet in Australia.
If the industry does not get into gear to move to the next generation of IP, a time will come when only the rich can afford access to stay connected to the Internet, he says.
 “The aim of the Internet of Things is to push, and push a little bit harder, but there is an underlying issue about all of this. That is contact-
ability and networking,” he told ATI.
Huston is Chief Scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the not-for-profit regional Internet registry for the Asia Pacific region. APNIC is one of five bodies globally that dispense IP addresses to network operators. Huston says that for each piece of a device to function, it must to be able to communicate with the network. An isolated processor in, say, a liftwell is useless until it is connected to a motion sensor at the door.  
But for that lift to be able to ‘talk’ to the sensor, it has to be connected to the network in the building. This means it has to have an IP address, or, as Huston puts it: “If there is to be a transaction, a machine needs to be able to communicate on that network.”
He told ATI: “All networks — whether the postal network, the telecom network or the computer network — need an address.
“The postal system is based on the hierarchy of number, street, block and so on.  And the telephone system kind of grew into a type of encoding, but is still based on a system of country, locality, provider, and subscribers.  
“The Internet is so fundamentally revolutionary because it is different to previous networks, including the postal and, certainly telephony networks. These place most of the the functional smarts inside the network, so that the devices attached are relatively simple.  
“The Internet achieves what it has achieved by making a fundamental break from that model. All of the intelligence sits in computers connected to a network. “Unlike humans, computers are extremely literal. You can programme them to do things but you can’t leave them to figure things out for themselves.”
The IP address is encoded into the protocol and that is difficult enough in itself.
Says Huston, understatedly: “When you’ve got to change the addressing field in the protocol, you are talking about reprogramming eight billion devices because every single one of them needs to understand the protocol. So you start to realise that this is fundamentally a very difficult problem.”
Huston has carried out a number of projects for the OECD. In the early 1990s, he and his peers, sitting on the Internet Engineering Taskforce — the international standards body that owns most of the work around technical standards for the Internet — started to work on the design for an IP address field to expand the number of bits outwards.
The Task force came up with Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), which is designed to accommodate a 128-bit field for addresses. This means, in layman’s language, that it can support literally an infinite number of IP addresses.
“IPv6 will solve the issue around address sharing, and if every computer has its own address, then we could talk about the IoT in an entirely different light.” Huston told ATI.
“But as long as we don’t do IPv6, the price for an address in the secondary market will continue to go up.”
The reality is that making the transition in the last 20 years from one protocol to the next has proved to be more difficult than imagined.
“We have run into all kinds of problems, not least of which are economic, policy and consumer issues,” says Huston.
Most countries in the world, including Australia, are still on IPv4 — which has a 32-bit address field. Its capacity is four billion addresses, but given human ingenuity, Huston says the digital industry has managed to share IP addresses —enabling eight billion devices to be connected to existing networks.
 “Thousands of devices are sharing one address, and network providers deploy a front end box — a network address translator — which effectively allows a single outward address to be dynamically shared across multiple points on the inside,” he says. As such, it is possible to have 2,000 people (or devices) sharing each address. The problem arises when it comes to identifying the device, says Huston.  
“In Australia, we have just passed a data retention law — ISPs now have to retain address records of subscribers to enable the AFP (Australian Federal Police) and other agencies to trace down the wire.  
“If you and I were sharing an address, how do you know which address you were using?  So address sharing has its problems.”  
Further, he says, there is a limit to sharing before it will reach a point that, if something goes wrong, there is no plan B.  Then, it might be necessary to contemplate breaking the network up into bits.
The nub of the problem goes to deregulation of national telephony networks, initiated by the Americans in the 1990s and strongly promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Deregulation has dismantled the public infrastructure investment model, and this infrastructure is now in private hands, says Huston.
“So when you say Governments should do something and that it is a multilateral problem, it is difficult because Governments have no money and if they regulate to force the private owners of these networks to do something about upgrading IPv4 to IPv6, it could backfire because regulations will scare off capital investment. The private market is sitting there saying: ‘You know it is a bottom-line problem. We are not really funded and our capital investment model doesn’t include the fact that we have to anticipate a problem in five years, because we don’t care about five years hence.  It is not our problem’.”
Manufacturers of ICT goods began shipping products with IPv6 a decade ago, Huston says, but what stops everyone is the last mile of the mobile and Internet access network.  In most countries, including Australia, access networks are the biggest problem.
He explains that part of this problem is the economics of running an access network.
“Margins are slim and the providers need to recover capital over many years. There is always the danger that is if they do the wrong thing, it can completely destroy the viability of what they are doing.” Still, some countries are moving across to IPv6, and these include the US, Japan and Malaysia.
In the past year, the number of users of IPv6 IP addresses has doubled, albeit from a tiny base of two per cent. Some countries are doing much better than others. “The reason one fifth of America is now able to run IPv6 is largely because the second largest ISP on the planet, Comcast, decided to deploy IPv6 across its national infrastructure,” says Huston.
“Deutsche Telecom is doing a huge rollout of IPv6. By contrast, the rate of IPv6 conversion is just one per cent in Britain and neither of the big networks in Australia — Telstra or Optus — is thinking about moving over to IPv6.”
Another problem is that, in every household today, there are devices, such as modems, which can only run on IPv4. These are devices that people will replace only when they break down and, in fact, this is the reason that just half of Comcast customers in the US have IPv6, Huston says.
Another problem is that old equipment and devices run on outdated software that is vulnerable to being hacked and co-opted to ‘evil’.
Huston despairs that “no-one can fix the problem and there is no fix”. “It is uneconomic to hunt down the hundreds of billions of Internet things,” he says. “It boils down to the tyranny of economics.”
Huston regards old devices as a ‘massive liability’ as they can be exploited to cause a DDOS (distributor denial of service).
Huston has a dark view of the way the Internet is headed. He says it is basically ‘toxic’.
“If you can’t hold your own, it is impossible to run your own service from your own infrastructure. You need other people to run it for you.
“That means you need the services of Google or companies of that size because they will have the resources to deflect massive cyber attacks. “If you choose to persevere with your own service, you run the risk of being
attacked continuously and being forced out of business.
“In this toxic environment, valuable services are forced behind castles and fortresses. It costs to run these services and their builders tend to monopolise the market. It is not longer an open Internet because, suddenly, the entry price is the price of the fortress.”