EuroDIG 15

I was invited to EuroDIG 15 in Sofia, Bulgaria, to participate in the opening panel on a  Common digital market in Europe, representing the technical community. 

The other panelists represented the Bulgarian Government, the EU commission, End Users and, I was representing the technical community. 

The arguments I made was:

Building a common digital market has some interesting technical aspects. First of all we want new players to be able to enter the market in the future. Both suppliers and consumers will need IP addresses to connect to the network. In the current IPv4 Internet this is getting increasingly difficult as there are very few IP addresses available for new players. This is solved by letting users share IP addresses. For both suppliers and consumers this will increase the cost and limit the services that can be provided. 

In government circles there is focus on broadband incentives, for instance for building fibre infrastructure. It is important that governments on all levels makes IPv6 a requirement for receiving governments funds. 

One of the questions from the audience was how we could trust services provided from other countries. This must largely be solved by common regulations and consumer protection mechanisms, but again there are technical solutions that can help increase trust and reduce fraud. One such technology is DNSSec. A solution where responses to name queries are signed to reduce the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks. 

One of the challenges in introducing new technology like IPv6 or DNSSec is to communicate the advantages in a way that the users understand and request the service from their service providers. In some countries like Sweden the country code registry has promoted the use of DNSSec in order to speed up deployment. 

For more details on the whole event, you may want to read the RIPE NCC report from the EuroDIG 2015