The IPv6 Transition

I've mentioned this previously. Without government-mandated standards, implementation could take years. We apply this approach to numerous areas; why should IP be an exception?

A world of being told what to do was not the "dream" of freedom for the internet.

If you want the government to mandate standards, vote with your feet and move to China where it has been mandated.

I thought the point of the article is that perhaps IPv6 is ultimately unnecessary: worse is better?

Why are we engineers so attracted to authoritarianism? The idea of just telling everyone to use the new version seems attractive to me too. Then again I often deeply admire practical engineering compromises. (edited: clarified)

Agreeing on a common standard is not authoritarianism.

Governments _mandating_ it sure is.

While legislation would be way to actually make IPv6 transition happen, what is the justification for such legislation and cost it would impose on the industry?

And that is the point of this article, for most participants of the internet the benefits don’t presently justify the involved cost.

Peer to peer networking is important to rare users like me so I can do things like host a private Minecraft server from my house for my brothers and I to play on, but this is not yet a problem for me on IPv4.

Interestingly a few years back while I was moving and had no internet for a few weeks I temporarily moved the Minecraft server to my brother’s house and we discovered he was on CG NAT which was a total nonissue before then.

I sent an email to the ISP saying we wanted to expose a port and asked how to do so and they changed my brother’s account to be given a public IP no questions asked or extra costs. And I found this policy okay because probably 99.999% of internet users don’t do anything over the internet where a public IP would make any difference to their life.

I expect once enough of the internet is on IPv6 the cost benefit pendulum will swing the other way, but we're not there yet and it’s not clear when it might happpen.

You said "government-mandated" - do you think your words matter?

That doesn't sound like agreement.

Agreement is how we have arrived at the imperfect solution we have now... Agreement between various technical and non-technical parties.

The DoD mandated v6 a few years back. The US government could easily dictate that all of their supplied software had to support it.

We have agreed on a common standard. It’s IPv6.

Forcing people to use it is authoritarianism.

You are also forced to use a seat belt. Calling it authoritarianism when we want to enforce a standard is absurd.

Seat belts have a reason. If I want to communicate with some computers using IPv4 or IPX, that’s my choice. Putting laws on what I can put inside of Ethernet is absolute stupidity

This seems like an extremely broad statement. You probably don't think all use of force is authoritarian, or not allowing any and all protocols to be used on the internet is force. Maybe, but not necessarily. Why specifically would retiring IPv4 be authoritarianism?

Static IP here in Australia costs AUD 5 per month for residential users… I think it’s just a price signal to entirely disincentivise it to anyone who doesn’t need it.

There's plenty of justification around the value of IPv6, but it will be lost on most users. But the same scenario has played out before where things that folks don't understand were enforced, like leaded to unleaded gasoline or removing CFCs.

Fastest way to get IPv6 going in the US is to mandate all government usage be IPv6 only by 20XX. Any supplier or vendor must work over IPv6. You'll see the industry fall in line very quickly, no one wants government money to be shut off.

Pick up the benefits of ending IPv4 development sooner.

One less thing to ship with every bit of network software.

One less learning outcome taught in every networking course.

One less piece of organisational complexity in every ISP.

Fewer rent seekers in the IP address space.

But these benefits are network effects and we only achieve them once IPv4 is relegated to the archaics of the internet tech stack.

In the US, if you want a static IP you often need to purchase a business connection, which is usually significantly more expensive (and residential connections are already expensive), and may not even be available if you live in a residential area.

I fail to see how mandating ISPs to implement and use IPv6 is equivalent to "putting laws on what you can put inside of Ethernet"

The government has more levers to pull than just a mandate requiring adoption.

For example:

- require support for ipv6 in order to qualify for government grants to ISPs to build or expand

- Require ipv6 support from any SaaS sold to the government

- require government websites to be served on ipv6, possibly exclusively on ipv6 by a certain deadline, although that might be too aggressive.

- grant tax exemptions on costs to upgrade equipment to support ipv6

- levy a tax on ipv4

None of those removes your freedom to use ipv4, they just provide incentives to use ipv6.

As far as I know, the US federal government does have a mandate that agencies be ipv6-only by end of 2025. Systems that are not converted by then require justification for why they cannot do so along with a replacement plan. See https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/M-21-0...

Being forced to use a seat belt isn't a standard, it's actually authoritarianism. And largely used as a pretense to pull people over without probable cause, rather than for any other purpose. Mandating that manufacturers have seatbelts in cars is the regulation of commerce. Mandating that ISPs provide ip6 is also the regulation of commerce. Ip6 itself is a standard.

A standard is something that people have to adhere to in order to measure things in a portable way, or for general interop. It's not anything that one is told to do by a government.

IIRC, when talking to our (USA) ISP, we need to upgrade to a business plan before we can then pay an extra fee per month for the static IP.

IPv6 adoption will take place overnight when either google chrome, Android or iOS start showing a warning on IPv4-only networks. ISPs and tech companies will start to get flooded with support calls asking about it and will choose to roll out IPv6 to make the problem go away. Chrome forced the web to go 100% https, the same thing will happen eventually with IPv6.

>Peer to peer networking is important to rare users like me so I can do things like host a private Minecraft server from my house for my brothers and I to play on, but this is not yet a problem for me on IPv4.

It's a problem for me now on IPV4

Conversely, blindly categorizing all government mandation as authoritarianism sounds like a highway to all kinds of logical fallacies! Is mandating a fair market (by e.g. punishing monopolies) authoritarian? A sensible person would answer no.

Similarly, mandating an Internet Protocol that doesn't require centralization (you know, NAT) and renting an address from the Big Boys (AWS etc) sounds like a perfectly sensible decision to me.

> Agreement is how we have arrived at the imperfect solution we have now...

I disagree. What we have now is not an explicit agreement, it's a status quo which can be broken by an external force.

I suspect that (nearly) all of the supplied software already supports it. Software support for ipv6 is nearly ubiquitous; configuration for ipv6 is the holdup.

Maybe don’t talk about stuff you don’t have any experience with then. Many ISP products are carrying Ethernet frames (metro Ethernet, the fabric at an exchange) or are even just leasing fiber.

In order to force IPv6 and ensure nobody is using IPv4, you absolutely are putting laws on what goes over those Ethernet frames.