Lawyers Will Save the Internet
Last night I made a long post about the latest Impending Death of the Internet story. I tried to explain it all in English, but I have since heard that even that modest amount of tech, plus the length, caused eyes to glaze over. So here is the argument with as close to no tech as can be managed:
Every couple of years there is another story about The Impending Death of the Internet, yet somehow the Internet is still here. The latest problem that threatens to kill the Internet is that there is less than a year left till we run out of addresses.
Someone tweeted that this felt a bit like the Y2k scare. (Computers used to store dates as two digits, because memory was expensive. But once we reached the year 2000 a lot of the math operations for keeping track of dates were going to break. This was generally considered to be a Bad Thing.) The underlying implication was that Y2k was a fake scare. While I’ll confess that some of the stories of horrors that might happen got stretched a bit, Y2k was very real. A lot of people worked very hard to make sure that the problems didn’t happen, and a lot of people (including me) were doing double shifts when the year rolled over in case we had missed something. Why were Y2k issues fixed so completely that people thought it was a hoax? Fear of lawyers.
The dangers of the Y2k issue were well understood, and the damage was predictable and preventable. I was Y2k champion for a group where I worked at the time and our instructions were clear. Take NO chances. Anything that we couldn’t PROVE was going to work had to be fixed or replaced, and it had to be complete by July 1, 1999. The risks of high dollar lawsuits wiping out the company were clear. So Y2k got fixed so completely that most people thought the threat was a hoax.
We really are running out of Internet addresses. However people far geekier than I have already worked out a solution. The fix for this is Internet Protocol Version Six, henceforth IPv6. IPv6 has a LARGE number of addresses. Large like the number 340 followed by thirty-six zeros worth of addresses. That should last us while we’re limited to a single planet (he said, blithely ignoring history.)
The pull quote in the article that started all of this says:
Moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is a little like changing the roads and tires while continuing to drive along in your car.
Fortunately almost everybody can remain asleep in the back seat.
Your Internet Service Provider will fix the problem with an upgrade to IPv6. They may have to send you a new cable modem or similar device, or they may fix it by sending new software to the device that already connects you to their network. But the ISP will change their network to do IPv6, while inside your house you keep using IPv4.
They won’t do it because it made your TiVo not update correctly. They’ll do it because it causes security features to fail. They’ll do it because e-mail ends up at the wrong place. They’ll do it because they fear that someone who uses one of those Internet phone services that cable companies are forever advertising won’t be able to call an ambulance. They’ll do it because someone got connected to the wrong bank account without having hacked the system. Once it is documented (or even suggested in the popular press) that they are putting your financial, health, shopping, telephone, and whatever other communications you do on a computer at risk the lawyers will do the rest. The Internet Service Providers will switch to IPv6 for the same reason that everybody fixed the Y2k bugs- They’re afraid of getting sued.
So the Internet is NOT going to die. We’re going to be OK. And the reason is something we usually curse, the litigious nature of our society.
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