Embracing Funerals
There is a appointed time for everything. And a time for every event under heaven — a time to give birth and a time to die…
Words penned by a King Solomon thousands of years ago, showing how things don’t change much. Of all the things there is an appointed time for one of the hardest must be the death of things. Endings; always so much harder than beginnings. When my father died my very eloquent brother gave a speech where he spoke of the careless way we take parents for granted. For the fortunate, there has never been a time in our entire lives when they haven’t been there. And then, often suddenly, they’re gone.
As with many truths, these ideas are universal and apply not only to dying mankind. It’s been 27 years since they turned on what we now call the Internet. Not that they quite knew what was being launched. And when I look around me, I deal with people young enough to have never worked without the Internet. Young enough to arrive in the place when they take what the Internet currently is, for granted.
I have no idea who “they” might be, but one of the stages of grieving is, they say, is denial. When we talk to people about IPv6 the other reaction we get is that denial. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the birth that follows death and that paralyses us.
What I want to suggest in this short post is funerals can be a good thing, in some ways the most natural rhythm of life. There is little doubt this is the biggest event to happen to the internet this century and the changes are for good, not bad. For sure there are some immediate technical changes like no ARP, no Network Address Translation and no broadcast. It’s the death of sub-netting as we know it. But it’s also great stuff like multicast that works, QoS built-in to the protocol itself, automated MTU discovery and load balanced DNS. With IPv6 ISP’s can’t just block ICMP altogether.
This is Internet2 and it’s a thing to be embraced, not to hide from. This internet we know and love is on notice; it’s been checked into hospital and is awaiting advise on how long it may live. What awaits is a world where internet nodes aren’t mostly PC’s. Phones, temperature probes, cars, televisions and consumer goods of all kinds are going to be the new internet. You’ll probably be able to watch multicast TV on a watch or broadcast the same to millions without the cost of a broadcast license.
My bet is protocols like multicast are going to give birth to killer apps in ways ISP’s haven’t thought through. It’s going to push back the centralization, censorship and the grasping hand of the powerful, giving the internet back to people like you and me. This is funeral we should celebrate. Internet One had a fun life that turned into much more than most ever expected. So put on your best black dress or suit and let’s get ready for a party.
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