[e2e] It's all my fault

[Frank Kastenholz]

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
 
> One thing the IPv6 debacle taught us (or should have taught us) is that any
> major new protocol designs for use in the Internet need to have a viable
> deployment plan, and a key part of that deployment plan has to be an economic
> rationale, i.e. a very good idea of who is going to benefit and how, and how
> that will drive the deployment, because without economic incentives to deploy
> something, it won't get deployed.

I'll disagree slightly.  This is true if and only if what is being
proposed will supplant something that already exists. Without
getting into its merits, what Dave proposed is not something that
requires replacing IPv4 with IPvDave -- it is something built
on top of (or beside?) IPv4.

The existing IPv4 base need not throw out everything and start over,
so there is no need, a priori, to sell IPvDave to the IPv4 world and
there is no need for a deployment plan and economic rationale
and/or incentives to convince the IPv4 users to switch to IPvDave.
Then, in the fullness of time, if it turns out that IPvDave is "better"
than IPv4, and better "enough", then either
- the world will evolve towards IPvDave, putting together the
  needed transition/interworking widgets using hillbilly-CS, or
- the IPv4 world will take the good parts of IPvDave and incorporate
  them.
Either way, Goodness Occurs.


> If that hasn't been said explicitly here, in part it's because I regard that
> observation as being on close to the same level as saying "2+2=4" - i.e.
> something so obvious that, like the air we breathe, it should not be
> necessary to bother to make explicit note of it.

See RFC1669 -- "Market Viability as a IPng Criteria"
which  John Curran wrote in response to the IP:ng 
call for white  papers  back in 1994...

> The other reason it hasn't been talked about here is that before you can
> decide whether something is economically viable, you need to have a proposal
> to evaluate. Business plans for novel things, be they for an overnight
> delivery service (FedEx), or for near-instantaneous long-distance
> communication service (telegraph) have to start with a novel idea.

Again, I'll disagree -- the sort of truly novel ideas (FedEx, The Internet, etc)
that you seem to be talking about here have pretty bad business plans
and look like they'll be gigantic flops.  This is precisely because they do
not fit the existing world-view of things, so they do not fit the existing
criteria for what makes a business proposition "look good". Usually
these things end up tapping into a latent demand that was hidden not
only from the business-plan-evaluation-gurus but also the very people
who have that demand. I mean, in 1980, how many people would have
said that they absolutely need to have a portable little widget that
was a combined telephone/email-thing/picture-taker/music-player?

f