Google no longer returning AAAA records?

[Ignatios Souvatzis]

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 10:56:38PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> On 4/16/15 10:22 PM, Frank Habicht wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >On 4/17/2015 6:45 AM, Erik Kline wrote:
> >>On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 12:28 PM, Brian E Carpenter
> >>>But the incentive is wrong. Forcing users to drop back to IPv4 offers
> >>>no incentive to fix the IPv6 problem. The correct incentive would be to
> >>>tell an operator that they will be blacklisted unless they fix {X and Y}.
> >>
> >>We almost never know what X or Y are.  We only detect that there
> >>appears to be a problem.
> >
> >maybe just a short email to the whois contacts (some really read them)
> >"we have noticed something wrong with your IPv6, we're now not giving
> >AAAA to these resolvers: x.x.x.x/y" and maybe a link to a test site...
> >
> >without that you're lowering chances of it being fixed. with that email
> >you increase them.
> 
> They also increase chances of the operator trying drag Google into an IPv6
> helpdesk role.
> 
> I don't like Google's policy on this, and I'm not sure it's what I would do,
> but I see their point.

Well, as far as I (as an outsider) can detect: Google does whatever
can be formulated as algorithms or heuristics and given to their
machines, and nothing else (or at least they don't admit it unless
forced in court).

Google's business model wouldn't scale to their number of peers* if
they had individual human support.

Their AAAA serving policy is consistent with this rule. If they
would handle it through auto-generated e-mails, they'd land on some
blacklist sooner or later; if they'd try to phone the responsibles,
that'd consume too much manpower. 

Not much that anybody can do about that. So if you're a knowledgable
peer detects "no AAAA", searching for IPv6 problems on your side
or your connectivity provider's is what you should do; and if you
don't, you'll get connectivity by v4.

I suspect Google will change their rule to be protocol independent
in the future... if v6 is better than v4 for you, they won't give
out A records to your resolver ;-)

	-is

*) most don't pay them, so they're not customers.