Of course these ideas are not that new. IPv6 was supposed to give end-to-end connectivity to all, and originally IPsec was supposed to be mandatory part of IPv6, giving each internet host cryptographic identity. And so on.
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IPv6 -together with WireGuard- gives privacy, security, and performance. The downside is the complexity to set it up.
Tailscale builds on the shoulder of giants. IPv4, WireGuard, Samy Kamkar NAT punching, OpenSSH, and probably many more. One of the upsides is the combination of these, and that the management interface in general is easy. But what counts for CA is also true for Tailscale: both are using FOSS to in the end deliver a (proprietary) service.
But because almost everything is build on top of FOSS and there's Headscale (and they're cool with it), this isn't a major issue to me. Like, it is a downside, but not a major one, as vendor lock-in is practically non-existent. In fact, it is likely an upside from a business/support PoV.
* https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1454.html
Here are the technical criteria for choosing the (then-labelled) IPng:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726
And finally the evaluation of the available candidates and why the winner was chosen:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752
If someone doesn't want to use IPv6, then what they're effectively suggesting is that we create a new protocol, and role it out to every smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, server, (Wifi) router/CPE, ISP router, SMB router, enterprise switches, and IoT device. Meanwhile we've already effectively run out of IPv4 addresses (e.g., ARIN and RIPE pools are zero) and are just shuffling about whatever is left in auctions.
> There's one thing I forgot to mention in that big long story above: somewhere in that whole chain of events, we completely stopped using bus networks. Ethernet is not actually a bus anymore. It just pretends to be a bus. Basically, we couldn't get ethernet's famous CSMA/CD to keep working as speeds increased, so we went back to the good old star topology.
Except for 802.11 Wifi.
Although I've heard some ideas for a IPv4.1 that suffer from the obvious problem, I think the far more common view is rather that v4 is fine and its only problem is solved by NAT. Which I agree isn't actually a long term solution, but let's try to meet the stronger argument.
The only reason why NAT is "solving" the problem is because IPv6 is taking some of the pressure off. T-Mobile US has 120M subscribers:
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/219577/total-customers-o...
And they went to IPv6-only:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGbxCKAqNUE
There's no way that would work in a no-IPv6 / IPv4-only world. Comcast ran out of 10/8 address space to manage their cable modems: how would that work without IPv6?
Google says India is 74% IPv6:
* https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
How would that work with only IPv4?
Even on smaller scales, without IPv6, supporting IPv4 with CG-NAT can get really expensive, real fast:
> We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from ROKU devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale(POS) equipment. So we cut ROKU some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices.
* https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s...
* Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624
Google says India is 74% IPv6:
* https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
How would connectivity for 10^9 people work with only IPv4? See also China. Each of those countries is 2^30 people, plus add another 2^30 for the continent of Africa, and you're already over 2^31. IPv4 is 2^32 addresses.