The IPv6 Transition

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.