A weblog of Internet Technology by Geoff Huston.
The IETF does not launch rockets, or design spacecraft, or even work on radio systems and spectrum assignment, but it has been engaged in the standardisation of communications protocols used to communicate with these spacecraft. Here's a few topics that were presented at IETF 126.
The 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was held in Vienna at the end of July 2026. It’s a busy week with a large number of meetings and conversations. These are some notes from sessions that had BGP-related content that I found to be of interest.
The 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was held in Vienna at the end of July 2026. It’s a busy week with a large number of meetings and conversations. These are some notes from sessions that had DNS topics that I found to be of interest.
The share price of SpaceX is some USD $164 per share, and if you multiply that price by the total number of shares in the company you get a market capitalisation of USD $2.163 trillion. The current estimate of the world's population is 8.264 billion people, so the share price of SpaceX is currently at a phenomenal USD $261 per head. Is this a rational valuation of SpaceX? Or do we have a classic…
These days you could be excused by suspecting that the world has gone AI-mad, and if you were at the NANOG 97 meeting your suspicions would've only been confirmed! The topics discussed the design of the data centres used to generate the large language models that underpin today's AI tools and the application of AI tools in network operations.
To what extent are DNS resolvers in today's Internet overly profligate in generating duplicate queries?
These days the Internet operates with vast infrastructure of replicated data, and the only differentiator between order and chaos is the ability to impose consistency upon the data through synchronisation across the distributed publication points of the same data. What tools can we use to synchronize data across multiple instances? There are many ways of performing this function, and here I'd like…
A presentation, by ISC's Ondřej Surý, at RIPE 92 was on the topic of DNS provisioning, looking at how to strike a balance between resilience and efficiency in the provisioning of nameservers of DNS zones and the performance of DNS resolvers. lets dive into this topic!
As a collection of inter-twined markets, aspects of the Internet have been prone to excessive market distortions where one, or a small clique, of providers in market sector become completely dominant to the extent that there is no effective competition and no possibility of admitting additional market entrants. This form of market dominance is often termed "centrality". How centralised is the DNS?
Much has been said about the use of the DNS as a means of tracking and controlling the online behaviour of users. The response has been to hide the DNS behind encrypted transport.
It's a new space race with a number of satellite operators pushing out LEO satellite services that operate directly to hand-held devices, or D2D.
In October 2026 the Key-Signing Key of the DNS Root Zone will rolled to a new value. Can we measure how well DNS Resolvers that perform DNSSEC validation are prepared for this change in the trusted root key?
How have we got to the point where certificates cannot be revoked?
NZNOG 2026 was held in Christchurch in March 2026. The NZ national community has a long track record of innovation, both in technology and in the underlying investment models for its network infrastructure. Here's a summary of some of the sessions that I found to be of interest.
It's fading from our collective memory, but almost thirty years ago the global IT industry was gripped by Y2K fever. Another version of the counter rollover problem is coming back in 2036, 2038 and 2040. Hopefully we will avoid a large amount of hysteria this time around!
For some time, I have been looking after a routing analysis report called the "CIDR Report". Here I'd like to explain the reasons for this report, and what is in the report and share some thoughts as to its usefulness today to the Internet routing community.
Today's digital world relies on a consistent view of the time. We achieve this with the Network Time Protocol (NTP). Given the extent of our reliance on an accurate time base it is surprusing that the NTP protocol has no security mechanisms to protect the integrity of time dissemination. Lets look at time, NTP and the recent efforts to add authenticity and temper detection to this protocol.
Is the DNS ready for IPv6? Are we ready to deploy IPv6-only Authoritative Nameservers? Let's measure the Internet to find out the answer!
NANOG 96 was held in February 2026 at San Francisco. Here are my impressions on some of the presentations that were made at that meeting.
It's quite surprising what you can do in the DNS when you break out of the conventional contsraints and adopt a more flexible view of the DNS query/response model.
The whois query tool is useful to identify which organisation holds an IP Address Prefix or an Autonomous System Number, but not so useful in performing the reverse query, listing all IP Addresses and Autonomous System Numbers held by an organisation. Here is a resource that can help with such queries.
It's time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.
The first part of this annual report on BGP for the year 2024 looked at the size of the routing table and some projections of table growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the routing table. BGP protocol behaviour in the form of dynamic routing updates are also part of this story.…
At the start of each year, it’s been my practice to report on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.
The activity of locating devices and users, termed "Geolocation" was the topic of a workshop, hosted by the Internet Architecture Board in early December 2025, and here I'd like to relate my impressions of the discussions that took place in this workshop.
NANOG held its 95th meeting in Arlington, Texas in October of 2025. Here's my take on a few presentations that caught my attention through this three-day meeting.
Civil unrest can often cloud measurement data. Some measurement systems, including the one we use at APNIC Labs, make relatively sweeping assumptions about the stability of both end user behaviour and network service behaviours, and assume that the changes that occur from day-to-day are minor. During times of civil unrest those assumptions are pretty dubious, and this applies to our measurements…
At APNIC Labs we publish a number of measurements of the deployment of various technologies that are being adopted on the Internet. Here I will look at how we measure the adoption of IPv6.
This article is based on a presentation I made to the ARIN 56 meeting in October 2025. Here I'd like to elevate the typical Regional Internet Registry policy conversations above the day-to-day mundanities of address allocation policies with its vocabulary of address block sizes and needs-based justifications, fairness and efficiency and look more broadly at the context of the industry we operate…
The 91st meeting of the RIPE community was held in Bucharest in October this year. It was a busy week and, as usual, there were presentations on a wide variety of topics, including routing, the DNS, network operations, security, measurement and address policies. The following are some notes on presentations that I found to be of interest to me.
"Where are you?" is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The Internet did not adopt a geographic address plan which means that you are going to need a lot of additional information if you want to map an IP address into a location at the level of a country or a city. But what can you do about a satellite service that Provides Internet access for ships at sea aircraft flying international…
The Australian Network Operators' Group, AUSNOG, held its 19th meeting at the start of September. Rather than simply relate the content of the presentations I'd like to take a few presentations and place them into a broader context to show how such topics fit today's networked environment.
I've always thought that the TCP protocol was the heart of the ingenuity that is the Internet. TCP is a flow control protocol that strives to produce both fair efficient outcomes, both for each TCP session, but for the networ4k as well. The essential feedback signal used by TCP is congestion-based packet loss, but this isn't the only approach. Another approach lies in enrolling the aassistance of…
The draft report of the Root Server System Governance Working Group is now out for public comment. Here's my thoughts on this report.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to develop Internet Standards and related best practices. At its July 2025 meeting in Madrid, several sessions explored the evolving role of congestion control in transport protocols and sparked the observations in this post.
As usual, IETF 123 was a busy week for DNS folk. I'll cover the material presented at the DELEG and DNSOP working groups. There is more to the DNS at IETF meetings than just these two working groups, and I'll skip over Adaptive DNS Discovery (ADD), Extensions for Scalable DNS Service Discovery (DNSSD), and DANE Authentication for Network Clients Everywhere (DANCE) in the interests of trying to…
The IEPG meeting is held each Sunday at the start of the IETF week. There is no particular theme for these sessions, although subjects of operational relevance are encouraged (www.iepg.org). These are my impressions of the presentations that were made at this IEPG meeting att the start of IETF 123.
We look in detail at the mechanisms used to trigger a client application (typically a browser) to connect to the server using the QUIC transport protocol.
The Internet was deliberately designed as a simple common substrate packet-switched network that could be able to support a huge variety of digital service profiles. The Internet's service profile was defined in the connecting devices at the edge, and not in the switching equipment in the middle of the network. The network model was intentionally so sparse that it was incapable of becoming…
There has been a major change in the landscape of the internet over the past few years with the progressive introduction of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I’d like to look at where we are up to with the deployment of QUIC on the public Internet. In so doing we also need to consider whether the DNS is ossifying in front of our eyes!
I want to look at just one day of the operation of the Internet’s BGP network by looking at the behaviour of a single BGP session. Nothing special or extraordinary happened on that day. There were no large-scale power blackouts, no major faults in the world’s submarine cable network, nor in the terrestrial trunk cable systems. No headlining-grabbing cyber attack took place on that day, as far as…
I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions, or in other words, an examination of the resilience of the RPKI infrastructure.
The way we've organised the Internet's routing system seems to be just too informal, too anarchic and too unstable to form the foundation of the world’s communication system. Yet, here we are. And, surprisingly, it works! Well, it mostly works, most of the time. From time to time anomalous things happen. In this article I’d like to analyse just one of the instances when things didn’t go according…
William Stanley Jevons was one of the founders of neoclassical economics in the mid-nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the great railway mania of the mid 19th century he observed that the total consumption of coal had actually increased when technological progress improved the efficiency of steam engines. Jevons Paradox observes that that improvements in efficiency of resource utilisation can…
The recent erratic moves by the US President to initiate a trade war on a global scale will have far-reaching implications beyond stock markets and will inevitably include the digital world and what we refer to as Internet Governance. The US moves on the unilateral imposition of tariffs can be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in global trade and open markets by the US, and a resurgence of a…