6Sense: Generating New Possibilities in the New Internet.
Produced by: IPv6 Summit, Inc.

Goals and Wishes for IPv6 in 2005:
The Groundwork Must Be in Place this Year
Alex Lightman, CEO, IPv6 Summit, Inc.

If you don’t know where you are going you will probably end up somewhere else.
 
The Internet will turn 32 years old (as IPv4) this year, and 99% of its growth has occurred in the last 12 years. Given that economists estimate that 1/3 to 1/2 of the growth in Gross Domestic Product during the 90s was directly or indirectly a result of the Internet (presumably including corporate networking using TCP/IP), America and many other countries could have added trillions of dollars in wealth if we could have had the Internet boom happen after ten years instead of twenty years. I challenge readers to come up with one other shift that was within our capacity (since PCs and Macs and dial-up were all readily available from 1984 onwards) that could have added more wealth than moving up the Internet boom by a decade.
 
I learned recently from Dr. Larry Roberts, director of ARPAnet, that the US federal government spent a mere $15 million on the project that became the Internet, with the total federal investment estimated at only about $50 million. I find it typical of a government that is blind to the distinction between investing vs. consumption that there is actually no reliable number for what was spent on the Internet. Had such a distinction existed, it is very likely that the Internet would be the greatest Return On Investment of any project in history, and that is including the Louisiana Purchase or Alaska, given that the Internet’s return was so soon, and the land acquistions were made over two centuries ago and one century ago, respectively.
 
Between fiscal year 1990 and 2000 the US federal government increased its revenue from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion, and if the economists are right and the Internet accounted for 1/3 to 1/2 of the GDP increase, which the federal government would get between 20 and 30% in taxes, then the $50 million investment in IPv4 infrastructure would be worth between $300 and $500 billion every year! This is a million-fold return – again, every year.

In this context I think it’s important to try to make the IPv6 boom start by 2006. To make this happen, many budgets and hearts and minds and products and transition plans need to turned towards IPv6 this year, in 2005. To make IPv6 take off in a big way in 2006, I offer as a starting point my annotated list of goals for 2005:

  1. President George W. Bush needs to give a speech expressing support for transition to IPv6. In Japan, both of the last two prime ministers, Mori and Koizumi, gave speeches stating they were working to make their country the number one nation in Information Technology, and that leading in the Internet was essential to this goal, and that leading in IPv6 was essential to leading in the Internet. As a result of these speeches, made at the urging of Prof. Jun Murai, Japan’s federal government invested $150 million in IPv6 promotion alone. The total speeches given by President Bush, and total funds budgeted for IPv6 promotion, are both zero. Not coincidentally, the US is losing ground in virtually all relative measures with respect to the Internet, as well as mobile data and mobile networking.

  2. All federal agencies need to come up with IPv6 transition plans, and the Office of Management and Budget must mandate transition of all federal systems to IPv6 by 2011, at the latest. This will still put the US years behind Japan, Korea, and the European Union, and possibly even India and China, but it’s better than no goal at all. Why must the federal government mandate IPv6? Because the federal government is still using Windows 95 and the Dept. of Defense had a mandate to use Windows 2000 until now departed DoD CIO John Stenbit changed the mandate: if there is no mandate to move to new systems, then the unwritten mandate will be to use ever older systems. The US federal government alone spends about $100 billion on IT, out of $1 trillion spent in the US annually for IT. Without that massive budget moving to createdemand that covers 10% of the market, there will not be a critical mass large enough to get the entire IT industry moving to IPv6 products and services.

  3. The Dept. of Defense should realize that IPv6 is not just about high level policy, but is primarily about the nuts and bolts, very practical and hands-on job of thousands of network administrators and purchasing managers either upgrading current networks, or buying new networks. The Office of the Secretary of Defense came up with the requirement for the mandate and estimated that managing the transition by 2008 would need $250 million to be accomplished. So far, less than $10 million has been allocated, and this amount has been cut twice in the first six months of the program. I have heard absurd comments related to this, to the effect that, when the DoD IPv6 Transition Office succeeds, then it will get proper funding. This is as logical as deciding to starve a child until he can win long distance running races, and then and only then he will get food. Under funding IPv6 transition work (not just policy or papers), not only with respect to other countries like Japan, but with respect to internal departmental estimates, will not cut it in a world that goes to work every day trying to beat America in information technology.

  4. The US Congress and Senate should hold hearings to ask what America and Americans are doing to promote IPv6 (of course, other countries should do the same – if you are not American, please just replace my goals here with your own country). I have seen increasing interest from the US Congress and Senate in IPv6, primarily from staffers, but have recently had conversations about IPv6 directly with a US Senator from a state that is home to many ISPs, and he expressed keen interest in learning whether and how IPv6 would impact those ISPs. My comment is that US ISPs have the most to gain, and the most to lose, from IPv6. Part of the hearings are to simply ask people if they have a plan, and what their budgets are. I would recommend asking the Japanese and Europeans to offer their perspective as well.

  5. Highly successful IT industry executives should give speeches that include support for IPv6. I have personally asked, face to face, a number of top tier IT execs, including Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and SUN CTO Greg Papadopoulos, if they were supportive of IPv6 (they all said yes) and if they would give a speech or otherwise champion IPv6 (they all referred me to someone else who didn’t have their power). I wonder what the problem is here. Bill Gates once said, “Let’s find the person who predicted the Internet and make him king.” Well, I predict that IPv6 will lead to trillions of dollars of economic activity within ten years of when it starts to take off. Isn’t it a no-brainer for executives who want to be credited with seeing the future sooner to maintain their reputations as being ahead of the curve to advocate, or predict, IPv6 before it is obvious to the average person? What are they waiting for? And if not them, then what other executives can or will speak out about IPv6? If they don’t, I hope people will call them on it later when they are making billions, or trying to get trade protection from the IPv6 superpowers like Japan and China as they bash in our brains and increase our trade deficit. Americans are too complacent about the fact that we are a net high technology importer. To be a net importer of IPv6 related products, though, would be a form of economic suicide, since IPv6 will be the platform for export of services.

  6. Get a report published by a reputable company or foundation or think tank that explores the promise and perils in service exports. The US service economy is over $9 trillion now, and has a $60 to $90 billion surplus, but the Dept. of Commerce statistics on service imports and exports are a joke, compared to the clarity of agricultural and manufactured good statistics, which are excellent. A broadband and IPv6 enabled service export boom is going to happen, and either America’s service exports will increase ten fold over the next decade, or our service imports will increase ten fold, and probably not both. IPv6 is not just a service pack upgrade, it’s as important to our commerce as having capillaries as well as arteries and veins, because it takes addressability and granularity to new levels of possibility for services, especially medicine, surveillance, security, monitoring, and remote operation, all of which will go from local to global competition in the near future.

  7. Consumer electronics companies need to announce when their mobile phones, game platforms, TVs, speakers, car stereos, satellite radios, iPods™, toys, DVD players, smart toilets, and home networking devices, as well as the associated developers’ kits, will support IPv6. And companies that announced IPv6 support for all their products, as Sony did two years ago when they claimed all their 70,000 products would be IPv6 enabled by this year, should be held accountable by the press and their customers.

  8. A system of recognizing exceptional IPv6 efforts, including but not limited to the 6Star program I am working on, should be made available to give “extra credit” and kudos to those companies that are actually using IPv6 and promoting and supporting it. Sure it’s necessary to sell IPv6 products and services, but new markets need champions, and I think companies that step up and help promote IPv6 should get acknowledged as leaders in 2005 for looking to 2010, rather than just resting on laurels earned five or ten or twenty years ago, especially in information technology.

  9. IPv6 events attract participation from key industries, including energy, automobiles, retail, white goods, transportation, and health care, which have been very conspicuous in their absence from IPv6 summits over the last six years.

  10. IPv6 applications that uniquely use IPv6 advantages come to market, and are made available as share ware or viral applications, starting with inclusion in mobile phones and game consoles that allow many more people to communicate many more ways with much bigger files at much higher resolution at much lower party line prices than ever before.

Please feel free to send us your suggestions if you have IPv6 goals for 2005. We will publish the best ones.