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hubie writes:

Back in 2018 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) announced that the IPv6 protocol had become a full Internet standard:

With IPv6 adoption accelerating over the past 6 years, from being a negligible fraction of the Internet (<1%) to recently topping 25% [Ed., now over 42%], moving IPv6 a full Internet Standard could not have come at a better time.

The Internet Standard designation represents the highest level of technical maturity and usefulness in the IETF standardization process. As the relative numbering of the RFC (RFC 8200) and STD (STD86) suggests, there are many protocols that make their way through the IETF standards process to be published as RFCs, but are not Internet Standards. The Internet Standard designation means those implementing and deploying a protocol can be assured it has undergone even more technical review by the IETF community than the typical RFC, and has benefitted from experience gained through running code and real-world experience. This is definitely true in the case of IPv6.

[...] Moving these IPv6-related specifications to full Internet Standards matches the increasing level of IPv6 use around the Internet. The IETF community has steadily worked to ensure that the Internet is ready for the time when IPv6 is the dominant Internet Protocol. Work in a variety of IPv6-related IETF working groups, such as 6man and 6ops, continues, striving to make the Internet work better.

On 02 July the IETF Executive Director announced that they have given up on IPv6 as being too much effort for their own services starting with email:

3. IPv6 for mail
As others have explained, we have chosen to switch, at this stage, to a large commercial mail sender with extensive reputation management rather than continue to send directly and as a consequence that will be IPv4 only. I don't plan to reiterate the multiple trade-offs considered in that decision, but I do want to stress that this was not a simple decision. I say "at this stage" because there are still discussions about whether or not this is the best long term strategy for mail delivery.

At a principled level, I agree that if the community says "we must have IPv6 for mail" then the LLC needs to deliver that, but at a practical level, given the cost and effort required, I would want that conveyed in a more formal way than a discussion on this list and us given a year plus to deliver it. However, and this is major however, piecemeal decisions like that are only going to make things much harder and it would be much better to have a broader decision about IPv6 in IETF services (more on that below).

For now at least then, we are going to continue with the plan to move to Amazon SES for mail sending. Once that is bedded down, that will be reviewed, but that will be several months away and the outcome may be to stick with it, unless there has been a community decision that changes that.

4. IPv6 for all services (or not)
If the community wants to develop guidance on the use of IPv6 for IETF services then that would be helpful. More generally, it would be so much better all round, if the implicit expectations that people have about IETF services, were properly surfaced, discussed, agreed and recorded. If that were done, then we would be very happy to include those in any RFP or service assessment.

Will people care if the organization who, for very many years, has been strongly advocating for everyone to switch to IPv6 has now given up on it? At a superficial level it doesn't look great if that decision was effectively made by AWS.

Original Submission