alt Hacker NewsThis is not a serious proposal and we should not treat it as such. And I apologise in advance for the length of this comment.
"IPv4 is a proper subset of IPv8. No existing device, application, or network requires modification. 100% backward compatible."
This cannot be true. Section 5.1 states that IPv8 uses version number 8 in the IP header Version field and the header is 8 octets longer than IPv4's. Any existing IPv4 router, switch ASIC, NIC, host stack, or firewall that sees a Version=8 packet will fail to parse it (most will drop it). Backward compatibility is logically impossible when the wire format is different.
The spec simultaneously demands sweeping new machinery everywhere: new socket API (AF_INET8), new DNS record type (A8), new ARP (ARP8), new ICMP (ICMPv8), new BGP/OSPF/IS-IS, mandatory certified NIC firmware with hardware rate limits, mandatory Zone Servers, mandatory OAuth2 on switch ports, mandatory persistent TCP/443 to the Zone Server from every end device, and a new IANA version-number assignment. "No modification required" is contradicted on nearly every page.
IP version 8 is already historically assigned (it was PIP, later folded into the IPv6 effort). The draft's IANA request ignores this.
The ASN model conflates identity with location. ASNs are organizational identifiers assigned by RIRs, turning them into the 32-bit routing prefix means an organization cannot change providers, multihome with provider-assigned space, or use PI space the way networks do today. Every organization that wants public IPv8 connectivity must now hold an ASN - roughly a 1000x increase in ASN allocation.
The /16 minimum injectable prefix rule eliminates essentially all of today's BGP traffic engineering and most multihoming patterns.
Cross-AS Cost Factor (CF) requires every AS on Earth to trust the metrics injected by every other AS, including a "economic policy" component. BGP is policy-based precisely because ASes do not trust each other's metrics, this has been understood since the 1990s.
The Zone Server kitchen sink (DNS + DHCP + NTP + OAuth + telemetry + ACL + NAT + WHOIS validation + PVRST root) concentrates a dozen unrelated functions into one box on one hardcoded address (.253/.254). This is an operational and security anti-pattern.
PVRST is mandated. PVRST is a Cisco-proprietary spanning tree variant, mandating a vendor-specific protocol in a Standards-Track draft is a non-starter for IETF.
The companion drafts (WHOIS8, NetLog8, Update8, WiFi8, Zone Server, RINE, routing protocols) are all by the same author, none have working-group review, and the core draft depends on all of them to function.
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I was waiting for the proposal to describe the header field where the sender would indicate which of the four simultaneous days in one 24-hour rotation of the earth he inhabited.
I hope your wrote that critique with an LLM[1], because the proposal is clearly not worth reading.
Having said that... China once proposed their IP version to create a locked-down domestic Internet. You have to wonder about the OAuth requirement in this IPv8 proposal. Maybe someone fleeced a dictator somewhere out of their money by promising to get a new secure Internet protocol standardised for them!
[1] With what prompt!? I like the terse output! Do share...
This has to have been at least researched via an LLM if not written by it. The form looks right but it is absurd. It angers me to think about how many people wasted their time and brainpower trying to understand this in the spirit of RFC good faith.