Re: Confirmation to advance: draft-ietf-6man-ipv6only-flag-05

[Sander Steffann <[e-mail]>]

Hi Brian,

> Job, I don't think there is any failure of communication. It's
> clear enough that you (and Nick and Sander) have reached the
> conclusion that the operational costs of the proposal greatly
> exceed its value. Other people have reached the opposite
> conclusion.

This proposal weighs advantages to a relatively low number of mobile (and maybe enterprise) networks against having to deal with any resulting operational issues in millions of unmanaged home networks.

I understand the people arguing in favour of this. I see that it would make their lives easier, save some battery life etc. But I work a lot with the smaller ISPs and their customers. I know first hand how incredibly hard it is to do remote debugging in an unmanaged third-party network. When the internet was a research project, an academic network and even a business network, I would love to see this draft. But now that the IETF makes protocols that extend into the domains of people who don't have any networking clue we have a duty to make our protocols easy to use, understand and debug. Protocols that are extremely resilient in those domains. And this draft goes against all that.

Please don't pretend that the IETF makes protocols for network engineers, and listen to the rest of the user base and their representatives as well.

Cheers,
Sander