IPv6 document

Internet Competitiveness in the 21st Century
The Internet came into being as a result of research funded by DARPA in the 1970s. That work resulted in early prototypes of the Internet Protocol (IP) being deployed at campuses and research sites around the US. Many of those institutions realized there was value in these efforts and invested time, money and other resources to further develop IP and related protocols and tools. The National Science Foundation also invested heavily in the deployment and spread of this infrastructure, a move that effectively spawned an entire industry within the US. Certainly there was valuable work done in other places, e.g. Europe, but the early days of the Internet were primarily a US effort.
That this work was done in the US had several consequences: One was that most of the US Research and Education (R&E) community were early adopters of this emerging technology. As such they were also able to obtain sufficient IP resources, e.g. IP address space, so that now 30 years later, these resources are often adequate to support the needs of those individual organizations.
However, as the notion of the Internet has taken root, it also has expanded into aspects of our lives such as cell phones, cash registers, home automation, and more recently into sensor networks and mobile wireless vehicles.  This growth and ubiquity was, to say the least, underestimated by the original creators of the Internet Protocol.
An unexpected consequence of this growth has been the imminent exhaustion of IP resources, including network address space. Tools such as Network Address Translation (NAT) have been introduced in an effort to extend the usable address space. However, these tools have the effect of breaking the end-to-end model, a guiding principle of the Internet. This model insures that end systems can communicate directly with other end systems in the network and is largely responsible for the ease of development of new Internet applications. The loss of the end-to-end model has already diminished the value and functionality of the Internet.
Recognizing that this growth and ubiquity would eventually exhaust Internet resources, the community launched an effort to develop and standardize a new Internet Protocol called "IPv6". IPv6 does solve some of the resource limitations of the original internet protocols.  In particular, this new version of the Internet has dramatically expanded addressing space and provides mechanisms to support the emerging mobile and wireless aspects of the Internet.
The current situation is thus:  The US and much of Western Europe by merit of their early Internet adoption have become comfortable in the "old" Internet Protocol.  But these old IP version 4 resources are now reaching exhaustion - with current resources they will not be able to support the deployment of vast nomadic services or environmental sensor networks and soon no more resources will be available. Other parts of the world such as Japan and the emerging economies of China and India are unable to obtain Internet addressing resources adequate to their economies and population and have therefore begun aggressive implementation of the new IP version 6.   Indeed, the capabilities of IPv6 will be necessary world-wide as we deploy more advanced, smaller, and more numerous mobile and wireless technologies.  Even our research and educational environments will be hampered by the exhausted resources of the old IP version 4. At this time, the organizations tasked to manage the IP number space have strongly recommended adoption of IPv6.
This situation will create an increasing disadvantage to US organizations - both in the R&E and commercial spaces.   Organizations using the legacy IPv4 protocols will be increasingly challenged to collaborate with international partners as the rest of the world becomes the technology leaders in new Internet services based on IPv6.   We- the US - need to recognize that the shift to this new Internet protocol is not just a technical issue, but an important strategic issue that will impact our global competitiveness in coming decades.
An incremental deployment of IPv6 with the goal of ubiquity is largely possible today - the internet hardware vendors support it, the major operating systems on PC, laptops, clusters, and servers support it.   But the services built on top of this infrastructure - the mail servers, the web servers, the web based applications and the legacy systems primarily utilize the old IP since, to date, there have been no obvious advantages, cost or otherwise, to adoption.
However, as the rest of the world, including the US federal government, increasingly adopts the new IP technologies out of necessity, US universities must make it a strategic priority to begin determined adoption of this new technology.  It is important to do so for good technical reasons but it is imperative to do so in order to collaborate in a global research and education environment in the future.
We want to raise this issue to the Intenet2 Board as an important strategic issue for our university and research community.  It is no longer simply a business decision based on near term costs.  Failure to begin the adoption- and resolve the issues associated with implementing these new network protocols - will have a detrimental effect on our institutional ability to participate in advanced internet based social, scientific, economic, and political evolutions in the very near future.