On IPvImperial and IPvMetric

The Society proposes, for the purpose of clarity, that the addressing schemes presently known as IPv4 and IPv6 be henceforth referred to as IPvImperial and IPvMetric. The proposal is not original. The mapping is exact.

The American operator will object to the prefix Imperial and prefer Standard. The Society notes that this is, itself, the point.

IPvImperial, like its dimensional counterpart, was devised by Anglo-American engineers in the previous century, was deployed before it could be properly considered, has been globally adopted by inertia, and is defended by its remaining users on grounds of practical familiarity. IPvMetric, like its counterpart, was designed by an international committee descended in spirit from the revolutionary French Académie that originally proposed the metre. The lineage is held against it by some. The world has, with the customary exceptions, adopted IPvMetric.

The United States has not.

The reasons given by American network operators are the reasons given by American mechanics, plumbers, and contractors. We have a system that works. Our customers don’t ask for it. It’s not a real problem yet. The Society does not dispute these claims. The Society observes only that the Republic of Liberia and the Union of Myanmar give the same reasons about kilometers, and that the United States is, with them, a charter member of an international club it does not realize it joined.

The Society is informed that France, Germany, India, and Vietnam have crossed fifty percent IPvMetric deployment. The Society is informed that the United States has crossed it as well, on paper, owing to the heroic exertions of two cellular carriers and a single residential ISP. American enterprise IPvMetric adoption, measured charitably, hovers near the freezing point in Celsius.

IPvMetric provides for the automatic configuration of network interfaces by means of router advertisement, a procedure the Society understands to be commonly summarized as from each according to its interface, to each according to its prefix. The Society does not endorse this summary. The Society merely reports it.

NAT is defended in the American literature as an elegant solution to address exhaustion. It is the same defense offered by an American on holiday in Toronto, doing kilometer-to-mile conversions at the gas pump while insisting that liters are confusing. The Society notes that performing the conversion in one’s head, twenty times an hour, for thirty years, is not elegance. It is a hobby.

The Department of Defense has, since 2005, formally mandated IPvMetric adoption across all federal information systems. Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. The Society draws no causal conclusion. The Society merely observes that the two mandates have produced, in absolute terms, the outcomes customary of five-year plans.

The Society holds no position on the matter. The Society’s fourth tenet is, on the question of hierarchical addressing, sufficiently clear. IPvImperial and IPvMetric are both hierarchical. The Society opposes them equally and approves of neither. The Society’s interest in this dispatch is anthropological.

It is, however, the Society’s considered observation that a country which measures fuel economy in gallons-per-mile, alcohol content in proof, and the temperature of human bodies in a scale where water freezes at 32°F, was perhaps not the population most likely to embrace 128-bit addresses written in hexadecimal.

The Society notes, without comment, that the IETF works in metric.

This matter is, for the present, open.