Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 11/17/20 12:40 PM, Rob Wilton (rwilton) wrote:

> If the world ever reaches the stage where only 0.2% of traffic is IPv4 and rest is IPv6 (or newer) then I wonder if ISPs will be willing to keep the IPv4 service up and running?

I'll answer the question, but first, explain why I don't think it's a 
valid analogy:   HTTP and FTP are not equivalent services; there are 
useful features in FTP for which equivalents do not exist in vanilla 
HTTP.   IPv6 is designed as a near-equivalent to IPv4; the only useful 
feature it really sacrifices is inability to directly talk to IPv4 
hosts.  Also, IETF is not a business and for most purposes should not 
try to act like one.

(Now as for the ISP question:  I presume ISPs will continue to support 
v4 as long as there's sufficient paying market.  And when there's no 
longer sufficient paying market to buy IPv4 directly from one's ISP, 
there will presumably be boxes for sale that can manage tunnels from 
one's enterprise LAN to private v4 networks and/or to whatever's left of 
the public IPv4 network.   It doesn't take much of a market to support 
the creation and maintenance of such boxes.   I suspect we'll see 
wide-area IPv4 networking of one kind or another for another 20 years; 
perhaps even longer than within enterprise networks. )

> Clearly there is some cost to keeping the FTP service running, but:
>    - Roman's analysis seems to indicate that it is used by very few individuals,
very few hosts != very few individuals
>    - there are viable alternatives (e.g., rsync, curl, wget, https), and

none of those are functionally equivalent to the FTP protocol.

The proposal to support WebDAV instead is somewhat more interesting, but 
details would need to be worked out.

Keith