IETF Draft Suggests Making IPv6 Standard On DNS Resolvers - Partly To Destroy IPv4

A pair of networking researchers have proposed that the Internet Engineering Task Force define support for IPv6 as a best practice for operators of DNS resolvers – the servers that translate URLs into IP addresses – and one of them hopes adoption of the idea will accelerate the demise of IPv4.

Momoka Yamamoto of the WIDE Project, a research consortium that works on internet technology and standards, and Tobias Fiebig of the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik penned an IETF Internet Draft in which they note that, although discussions on IPv6 commenced decades ago, it’s still not universally deployed. One consequence of that is that some DNS resolvers may use only IPv4, and struggle to do their job for domain names for devices and networks that use only IPv6. Websites may not feel the need to use IPv6, which keeps the world tied to IPv4, perpetuating the cycle.

"This poses a challenge for such resolvers because they may encounter names for which queries must be directed to authoritative DNS servers with which they do not share an IP version during the name resolution process," the pair wrote.

Current IETF best practice, 2004's RFC3901 requires authoritative/recursive DNS resolvers to implement IPv4 but left IPv6 as an option. For what it’s worth, one of the authors of RFC3901 worked at Sun Microsystems, which, in 2004, was still an independent company – a factoid we mention as an indicator of the RFC's age and status as a product of a distant epoch of internet history.

Fiebig has researched the impact of requiring DNS servers to adopt IPv6 and can find no negative consequences. His research will soon appear in a paper titled "'How I learned to stop worrying and love IPv6': Measuring the Internet’s Readyness for DNS over IPv6" that he co-authored with Max-Planck-Institut colleague Anja Feldmann.

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IPv4 problems

Fiebig also thinks that requiring DNS resolvers to use IPv6 may help to reduce use of IPv4, which he posits creates more problems than it solves.

"The Internet should, as one of the largest human made pieces of technology, work towards a better future for everyone. However, with the accumulation of perceived value for IPv4 addresses due to their scarcity, various actors see IPv4 as an 'asset' for generating 'profit'," Fiebig told The Register.

"Some of these actors are actively attacking the multi-stakeholder principles of the Internet to improve their investment position," he added.

"I personally believe that this conflicts with building a better world for everyone; having the scarce resource of IPv4 as a pre-requisite for participating in the global Internet creates an unnecessary fiscal boundary, and proliferates centralization, while being additionally harsh on emerging economies, grass roots movements, and generally things being done for and by small and local communities."

If the draft Fiebig and Momoka created sees more operators of DNS servers adopt IPv6, and that spurs wider use of the protocol and less use of IPv4, Fiebig will not mind one bit.

Fiebig also told The Register that Momoka was the driving force behind the proposal and brought it to the IETF. "Without her. this would have gone nowhere," he said. ®