The premise is completely wrong here. IPv6 is not just an “incremental change” that would have represented an easy uptake. Instead, pretty much every practical detail of existing IPv4 infrastructure, both hardware and software, was broken. Massive swaths of extra management and security tools were rendered useless. It was a massive miscalculation.
In the meantime, we figured out how to make things work without the extra address space. And the dream of a point-to-point Internet turned out to be a terrible idea after all. IPv6 pushers love to hate on NAT, but it’s actually a really good design choice that’s fundamental to basic network security.
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