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Is there hope for IPv6?

internetgovernance.org

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Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#23
post #5

What if we started charging a small but slowly increasing annual fee for each IPv4 address? And with the proceeds ICANN starts buying back IPv4 blocks and permanently retiring them.

That might actually have the opposite effect of what is desired. Whoever is charging and benefiting from the fee would then have an incentive to maintain the status quo of IPv4 and continue collecting the fees. We’re already seeing this now as people are selling IPv4 addresses. Scarcity + demand creates market opportunities.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#24
post #10

Perhaps I just misunderstand IPv6 but I prefer IPv4 with NAT and temporarily leased public router address for privacy and security reasons. AFAIK IPv6 means every device gets assigned a stable unique address everybody can identify and reach it by. And I have never seen a SOHO WiFi router that would support IPv6 anyway (perhaps latest fancy expensive ones do).

Windows uses ipv6 temporary addresses by default. NAT isnt security, and lot of implementations are faulty, so dont depend on it for security.

NAT absolutely is security. It prevents naming a resource that an attacker shouldn't have access to, which is the fundamental principle behind many successful security schemes: capability models, containers / virtualization, MMUs, etc.

Sure, there are implementation flaws (as there have been in other such schemes), and sure, just clicking a NAT button and walking away doesn't get you security any more than just clicking a capability or virtualize or MMU button gets you security. But it's a powerful and solid building block, and the Internet is a better and safer place because of widespread use of NAT.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#26

Perhaps I just misunderstand IPv6 but I prefer IPv4 with NAT and temporarily leased public router address for privacy and security reasons. AFAIK IPv6 means every device gets assigned a stable unique address everybody can identify and reach it by. And I have never seen a SOHO WiFi router that would support IPv6 anyway (perhaps latest fancy expensive ones do).

This is entirely legitimate. IPv6 is actively confusing in what "enabling" means - is there a firewall, and under what conditions are ports opened? Is there mandatory use of privacy addresses from clients, and is there any protection from clients who generate SLAAC addresses from their MAC address? Is there a NAT? (NAT66 is a thing, but very few people implement it.) The mental model of IPv4 NAT is much more straightforward and I would strongly recommend that home users prefer that.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#27

I hope (but am skeptical) that folks look at the overall failure of ipv6 from a deployment perspective to understand the root causes of why it failed (some may think "failure" is too strong a word, but I remember v6 being "just around the corner" in 2000, yet in 2019 I'm still connecting to a GCP database with v4). Coming up with a solution that looks like a huge technological advancement, with no real respect for th…

What does a system that does take those incentives into account look like?

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#28

Yup, now you have to go out of your way to not support it. Literary, every modern ISP, hosting or Cloud provides it. Every Operating System, be it server or client or router, supports IPv6.

What does "support" mean? Everyone having an IPv6 stack with no routing between them isn't "support".

For instance, do you support RDNSS or DHCPv6? How big are your multicast tables?

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#29
What we really need is a killer app that requires end-to-end connectivity. Users have little reason to care about IPv6 right now because the existing ecosystem of services has evolved around the constraints of NAT. As IPv6 deployment expands hopefully we will reach a point where some great new application becomes economically viable.

My biggest fear is such an application not emerging quickly enough. Without an imperative from users for end-to-end connectivity there's a risk that IPv6 networks which somehow break it become entrenched. If that happens we are back to the old chicken-and-egg situation: Users don't care because there's no app and there's no app because the network is broken and operators don't care.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#30

The weird thing is that on some countries IPv4 only turned effectively into the premium offering. This is for instance the case in Austria where you generally have the option of ipv4 or ipv6 with dslite or worse only. All new contracts are ipv6 and the only way to get to ipv4 is via customer support. However right now ipv4 gives you the better experience.

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