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The early days of the Internet were marked by a constant churn of technology. For example, routing protocols came and went in rapid succession, transmission technologies were in a state of constant flux, the devices we used to interact with the emerging digital environment were changing, and the applications we…
The DNS is a remarkably simple system. You send it queries and you get back answers. Within the system you see exactly the same simplicity: The DNS resolver that receives your query may not know the answer, so it, in turn, will send queries deeper into the system and collects…
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992 the IETF gazed…
The first part of this report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the routing…
At the start of each year, I’ve been reporting on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.…
I don’t normally make the effort to attend the Internet Governance Forum gatherings these days. It seems to me that this forum continues to struggle for relevance. In my view it has never been able to realize an effective engagement with the set of actors who make up the supply…
The IETF held its 115th meeting in London in November 2022. This was another in the set of hybrid meetings with specific support for online attendees in addition to the normal face-to-face meetings for the week. In no particular order, here are a few of my impressions from the IETF…
The Internet’s Domain Name System undertakes a vitally important role in today’s Internet. Originally conceived as a human-friendly way of specifying the location of the other end of an Internet transaction, it became the name of a service point during the transition to a client/server architecture. A domain name was…
In August 1858, Queen Victoria sent the first transatlantic telegram to U.S. President James Buchanan. The cable system had taken a total of four years to build, and used 7 copper wires, wrapped in a sheath of gutta percha, then covered with a tarred hemp wrap and then sheathed in…
I’d like to reflect on a presentation by Dr. Paul Vixie at the October 2022 meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), on the topic of the shift to pervasive encryption of application transactions on the Internet today. There is a view out there that any useful public…
