RIPE, Europe's Internet governance body, opposes a proposal to reshape basic Internet protocols supported by the Chinese government, Chinese telecommunications companies and network equipment provider Huawei.

The proposal, called "New IP", is a reworked version of the TCP/IP standards to support new technologies. It includes a "shutdown protocol" to shut down faulty parts of the Internet and a new governance model that centralizes the Internet and puts it in the hands of a few critical node operators.

Submitted last year to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and published last month by the Financial Times, the new proposal immediately drew criticism. To the general public and privacy advocates, it is an obvious attempt to hide Internet censorship features behind a technical overhaul of the TCP/IP protocol stack.

In short, an attempt by the Chinese government to export and impose its autocratic views on the rest of the Internet and its infrastructure. Especially since several countries such as Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia have given their support.

On its blog, the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, West Asia and the former USSR, RIPE NCC, has officially spoken out against China's new IP proposal.

Marco Hogewoning, acting director of public policy and Internet governance at RIPE NCC, says "Do we need New IP? I don't think we do. [...] Although there are some technical challenges with the current Internet model, I don't think we need a new architecture to solve them."

Any attempt to overhaul Internet protocols should be left to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and not the ITU, where political influence is more important than technically sound arguments, he said. RIPE is also concerned about the desire to change the decentralized nature of the Internet.

The organization expressed its concerns in a paper sent to the ITU in February this year: "RIPE NCC is deeply concerned about what has been proposed here.[...] We are particularly concerned that this proposal represents an opportunity to move away from the traditional 'bottom-up' decision-making model. We also believe that the technical justification presented is flawed and find the alternative designs suggested to be both unrealistic and unproven".

With the new proposal due to enter the test phase in 2021, Hogewoning urges national Internet governance organizations to contact local decision-makers and recommend voting against it as well as a vote at a later date.

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Source : ZDNet

On November 25th, 2019 at 3:35 p.m., the RIPE NCC made its last IPv4 /22 allocation. The organization is now short of IPv4 addresses. An announcement that comes as no surprise to network operators: the RIPE community has long anticipated and planned the exhaustion of IPv4. Indeed, the RIPE NCC has been able to provide thousands of new networks with /22 allocations through responsible management of these resources by the community.

Even if there are no more IPv4 addresses, RIPE NCC will continue to retrieve them. These will come from organizations that have ceased operations or closed, or from networks sending back addresses that they no longer need. These addresses will be assigned to members (LIR) based on their position on a new waiting list that is now active. Only LIRs who have never received an IPv4 allocation from the RIPE NCC can request addresses on the waiting list, and they can only receive one allocation /24. However, these small amounts of recovered addresses will not be close to the millions of addresses that networks need today.

This event is another step towards the global exhaustion of the remaining IPv4 address space. The emergence of an IPv4 transfer market and the increased use of Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) in recent years does not solve the underlying problem: there are not enough IPv4 addresses for everyone.

Without large-scale IPv6 deployment, there is a risk of moving towards a future where the growth of the Internet will be unnecessarily limited due to a shortage of unique network identifiers. There is still a long way to go, and RIPE NCC calls on all stakeholders to play their part in supporting IPv6 deployment.

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Source : RIPE NCC

In early June, AOTA, the Association of Alternative Telecommunications Operators, called on the government to "address the transition to IPv6 and the preservation of the competitive balance".

The Directorate General for Enterprise (DGE) has just replied: "the transition to this new communication protocol now appears to be a major challenge for competitiveness and innovation". However, it states that "the government's capacity to act in this area is limited by the lack of a legislative basis to regulate this type of resource, as IP addresses are managed at the international level by ICANN and allocated directly at the European level by the European Internet registry, the Amsterdam-based RIPE NCC".

To find a solution, "the French authorities will propose to the Presidency of the Council of the European Union that it put the issue of the transition to IPv6 on the agenda of a working group of the Telecommunications and Information Society Council and that it refer the matter to the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) for its opinion".

Despite a "timid response", the AOTA welcomes the fact that the State is taking the issue seriously. The Chief Electoral Officer also points out that the Arcep can play a supporting role in facilitating the transition to IPv6, and that a "task force" will soon be set up by the Arcep on this subject".

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Source : Next Inpact