Google and IPv6

[Nick Hilliard]

> at the risk of sounding a trifle unthankful, I wonder whether the two 
> AAAA records could be added to that for www.google.com, making the 
> standard google search bar reachable by IPv6. It would be nice if as a 
> result of the relevant engineer's work Google now had a service that was 
> in common use and measurable by google in such a way as to guide them to 
> widen it over time.

Fred,

I think you of all people should be aware of the operational and business 
impact of jamming quad A records to the default search tool in the browser 
of choice for, what? 30% of the internet population?  Realistically, the v6 
internet is about as mature as the v4 internet was in the early 90's, and 
making this sort of change without any real-world experience or pilot 
operation is going to leave a very bad taste in a lot of peoples' mouths, 
not least the business management units of these companies who are going to 
get very narked indeed if they suddenly see x% business drop-off because 
the engineering section has decided to conduct an interesting experiment. 
Let's not kid ourselves here; Google is in the business of making money, 
and if v6 is going to get in the way of that, v6 will end up as roadkill.

Don't get me wrong:  AAAA records will have to appear sooner or later, but 
now is the wrong time.

The truth is that adding AAAA records will cause reachability loss of 
unknown magnitude.  We don't know what's going to happen to the teredo and 
6to4 tunnel brokers in this situation; we don't know what's going to happen 
with broken CPE DNS relays, and the v6 DMZ is still in a shockingly poor 
state, to name but a few problems.

Creating ipv6.google.com is a really good start and will do several useful 
things, including providing good feedback to Google on provisioning 
production v6 services, and giving the v6 internet some rare good publicity 
which it desperately needs.

Any transition of the large content sites to v6 is going to be painful. 
But it's incumbent on the engineering department of all large companies to 
take things very carefully and one step at a time, and to ensure that their 
management are fully aware of what's going on, and that they are fully 
informed on what the possible short term and the definite long term 
repercussions are in choosing to implement v6 reachability or not.

Nick
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