Some more on IPv6 in ZA

Well, there we have it. Our ministers have just said that there’s absolutely no reason it should be so hard to do:

Speaking to ITWeb yesterday, acting deputy director-general of the Presidential National Commission on Information Society and Development Themba Phiri said: “The IPv6 issue is a simple transition. All you need is the equipment that enables new registration of the domain names.”

Source: this article. I’m not entirely sure which part about this worries me out the most, but there’s a few strong contenders in-between all the apparently stupidity, clueless and out-of-reachness that this sort of opinion entails. But the fact that these people are policy-makers and decision-makers on things regarding technology here…well, their lack of knowledge is concerning. If their advisors are at fault for this opinion, their advisors should be fired. If their inability to recognize their advisor’s information as complete bullshit is the cause for them to propagate this opinion, it’s just as concerning. How do we fix this?

[update] for the non-technical readers: basically, there’s significantly more to actually getting IPv6 onto a network than just “the registration of the domain names”. Most importantly, domain names have almost nothing to do with IPv6 (short of how your computer can know to access something using IPv6 as opposed to IPv4, and where to actually try to find the resource you’re attempting to access).