[korethr]

low whistle I imagine they paid a pretty penny for those /12s.

A thought comes to me: If IPv6 adoption continues to drag along, and AWS/Azure/GCP continue to expand their IP blocks like this, how quickly are we in danger of the cloud providers effectively being the Internet?

[wu_187]

I've worked in the cloud hosting industry for a decade and a half. The entire time, we were warned about the IPv4 shortage and how we needed to switch to IPv6 soon(tm). Well, things haven't changed. Everyone is dragging their feet on IPv6 adoption from hosting providers, ISPs, hardware manufacturers, and software developers. I predicted this years ago and always said that it would require a government mandate to move on from IPv4. I honestly believe we are going to ramp up NAT in the coming years before really doing away with IPv4.

[xvilka]

Some countries did exactly that, China for example. Most of the infrastructure, ISP networks, even user applications here is now IPv6 or ought to be in a few years [1].

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/china_single_stack_ip...

[toxik]

To be fair, this is exactly the type of thing you’d expect China to be good at, unilateral decision making.

[syntheticnature]

Also, when your country's population is such that the entire IPv4 address space could only allow three addresses per resident, with that ignoring all reserved / multicast restrictions...

[vmception]

Benevolent leader is the best case of government, it is just improbable and of course it is too risky for any dissenter, and the successor is never as good. So people go for inclusive forms of government, which produces average case results more often.

[nousermane]

NAT is ramping up on client side. Many home-internet connections are now NATted twice - in CPE, then again in CGN.

On the server side, in contrast, NAT is winding down. 15 years ago, it was common to have either DMZ-style NAT, or on AWS you had to have NAT (they call it EIP). Nowadays, having a CDN or could-native load-balancer in front of your server is increasingly common. And behind those, that server just don't need a public IP (maybe only a shared outboud NAT for OS updates). That is - if you have a server at all (and not moved to lambda, S3, etc...)

[athrowaway3z]

Yesterday i spend 2 hours trying to figure out why i couldn't ping my home router, only to find out this is probably the reason.

Luckily i had created a reverse ssh tunnel on a vps before leaving.

[innocenat]

ISP blocking ICMP might be a more probable reason than CGNAT. At least where I live.

[lazide]

It’s hard to tell sometimes what is going on. I just learned for instance that the cable modem provided by Comcast switched to NAT - and my router is also doing NAT - and my business firewall also does NAT. So at least 3 layers now.

If they are doing CGNAT further into the infrastructure, how would I even be able to tell at this point? I’m assuming someone would also block ICMP just so it would be less embarrassing, but who knows.

Comcast does generally seem to be moving towards IPv6 at least, which is helpful.

[innocenat]

> If they are doing CGNAT further into the infrastructure, how would I even be able to tell at this point?

Check the IP on your WAN interface of your modem? I mean, that's how I have always been checking for CGNAT.

[jaywalk]

Comcast doesn't do CGNAT, and their network has been 100% IPv6-capable for years now.

[JakeBrander]

Highly unlikely we will ever see the day IPv4 is not used at all. There are too many legacy systems in place, so dual stack will always be required. The value of IPv4 may drop as it related to the price people pay, however, it will play a key role for decades to come.

As for the government mandate, also not possible. It would take our major ISPs over a decade to make this work, and the lobbyist would never allow it.

With that said, the DOD did make an interesting decision to move 175 Million IPs recently in routing tables.

You can read a short blog post here: https://brandergroup.net/2021/06/175-million-ipv4-addresses-...

[dekhn]

I spent some time trying to upgrade my home network to primarily-IPv6 (mainly so I could more easily address internal computers from the outside). I was pretty unimpressed with the results; I expect to have to run dual stack for the foreseeable future.

[technofiend]

I just don't get it. We already have regular hygiene programs to remediate legacy stuff - remove weak encryption methods, scan for CVEs and patch old versions, etc. IPV6 isn't any harder to use than IPV4 except for storing a larger IP address. Really, there's no excuse and that goes double for anyone using a modern stack instead of legacy.

[api]

All this is because IPv6 addresses are too long. If they’d made it 48 or 64 bits we would be fully converted by now. We are dragging because people hate using it.

I’ve been saying this for years. Nobody gets it because geeks don’t get ergonomics.

[mgkimsal]

I've said it for years too. It's not JUST because they're long - years ago (and maybe even today?) there's still some hardware issues with keeping large sets of addresses for routing (I'm not an expert on this - I seem to remember reading about this years ago - larger ISPs not being able to keep all their routing rules in memory because of IPv6 address sizes - maybe I'm WAY off).

But, yes, generally, you're right. It's been seen from the very beginning as "a big move". If every address A.B.C.D was addressable as 0.A.B.C.D, and we opened up another 255 * 4 billion addresses... we'd have been converted a long time ago. And we'd have been better at actually implementing 'upgrades' because they'd be already done/completed - it wouldn't be a 'monumental task(tm)'.

We don't need every atom in the universe to be able to have 16 public addresses.

[kazen44]

> (I'm not an expert on this - I seem to remember reading about this years ago - larger ISPs not being able to keep all their routing rules in memory because of IPv6 address sizes - maybe I'm WAY off).

in modern (last 10 - 15 ish years) routing table size has been roughly the same for IPv4 and IPv6.

Modern, ISP grade routers have control and forwarding planes seperated between different (usually redundant) hardware components. The control plane is responsible for keeping states of routes (which routes do i recieve from a routing protocol? where is my next hop according to rule XYZ etc). Forwarding plane is responsible for forwarding packets across interfaces.

Route lookups happen in the control plane, but a route lookup is almost never for a dedicated address (especially in IPV6). route lookups happen at the subnet level, and IPV6 has a "standard" subnet size which leaves half of the address space for the subnet itself. (the first /64 subnetmask bits are used for network differentiation, while the other /64 is used to create host specific addresses).

This cuts down on TCAM size considerably, because the router doesn't need to store 128 bits of information per host, but only 65 bits + subnetmask for a very large group of hosts.

besides this, IPv6 has another advantage because fragmenting routes is far more difficult then in IPv4.

Usually, organisations get a /56, the ISP usually handles /48's and RIPE/IANA etc work with /32.

This all keeps the IPV6 routing table far smaller then the IPv4 routing table, which was one of the reasons IPv6 was invented in the first place.

> But, yes, generally, you're right. It's been seen from the very beginning as "a big move". If every address A.B.C.D was addressable as 0.A.B.C.D, and we opened up another 255 * 4 billion addresses... we'd have been converted a long time ago. And we'd have been better at actually implementing 'upgrades' because they'd be already done/completed - it wouldn't be a 'monumental task(tm)'.

would this actually change the amount of "momumentalism" in switching ipv4 for something else? Backwards compatibility with larger address sizes (be it 128 bits, 33 bits or whatever) is not possible because ipv4 stacks can only hadle 32bit address space. Updating those is about as a monumental task as implementing IPV6, considering you would still need two network layer stacks for each device to handle both IPv4 and the "ipv4+" version.

[lillecarl]

> in modern (last 10 - 15 ish years) routing table size has been roughly the same for IPv4 and IPv6.

Really? I see 700k routes v4 and 70k v6 routes.

IPv6 will keep routing table size smaller since they can preallocate HUGE subnets to every AS (AS is what people would call an ISP pretty much) so that they only have to split their subnets by geolocation.

[kazen44]

i should probably clarify.

what i meant to say was, that in modern routers, IPv4 and IPv6 theoretical routing table size can be the same. There is no difference in terms of maximum routes in the routing table between both protocols.

[Denvercoder9]

> If every address A.B.C.D was addressable as 0.A.B.C.D, and we opened up another 255 * 4 billion addresses... we'd have been converted a long time ago.

That has nothing to do with the address being long, but with being compatible.

[remuskaos]

I know this is probably so much not your point, but there are assumed to be 10^80 atoms in the visible universe, and 2^128 is only 3.4*10^38.

[api]

In designing ZeroTier I put a ton of effort into creating a secure P2P layer with addresses that are only 40 bits long. This effort continues with new solutions being worked on to maintain security while allowing more openness and federation.

It would have been much easier to use long addresses that are long hashes of keys. Having only 40 bits means we need two layers of defense in depth to prevent intentional collision: a work function to make the cost substantial (about USD $8M per collision on today’s public cloud) and a single source of truth for lookup that still supports federation. You could punt on all that with 128 or 256 bit addresses.

Yet I did it because I was quite aware that it was very necessary for usability. I have had many people tell me they love that they can type a ZeroTier address.

I would bet anyone that if the addresses had been gigantic we’d have 1/10 the adoption.

Software is first and foremost for people to use. Most of the complexity in software exists for this reason.

[p1mrx]

ZeroTier has a flat address space governed by a single algorithm. The Internet is a loose hierarchy of independently-managed networks. These problems have quite different addressing requirements.

Analogy: ZeroTier is to https://plus.codes/ as IPv6 is to mailing addresses. A mailing address is pretty long, but you can use its structure to route the mail efficiently.

[api]

The Internet is governed by a single algorithm: IP routing. Short IP addresses are a lot easier than short cryptographic addresses.

Adding 16 or 32 more bits to IPv4 would have been trivial. The existing IPv4 address space becomes 0.0.n.n.n.n or perhaps 0.n.n.n.n.0 if you wanted to give every existing IP 256 addresses to assign while also multiplying the IP space by 256.

Easy, easy, easy.

[p1mrx]

> We don't need every atom in the universe to be able to have 16 public addresses.

IPv6 isn't even remotely that big. There are about 10^38 IPv6 addresses, 10^50 atoms on Earth, and 10^80 atoms in the universe.

[robbedpeter]

So you could probably address every grain of rice throughout all of human history, but not every atom on the planet.

[mindslight]

IMO it's because they used stupid semicolons in the syntax instead of sticking with periods. Nobody likes hitting the shift key, especially so rapidly and while typing numbers.

[Dagger2]

Sticking with periods was impossible, because many of the resulting addresses would also be valid DNS hostnames.

[mindslight]

DNS names already conflict with v4 addresses, and we deal with that ambiguity just fine.

For an actual conflict, someone would need to be using hostnames that had at least 16 segments, none of which were longer than 4 characters. Putting the burden on someone who wants to use extremely deep hostnames that look like bare IP addresses to type a trailing . on their hostname seems plenty reasonable to me. And if they want to use resolv.conf:search while still typing in 16 segments of a hostname, then that ambiguity could be resolved with a leading period.

I suspect the real reason is people who wanted to be able to write ad-hoc parsers using strchr().

[Dagger2]

We deal with it by requiring v4 addresses to be entirely numeric, which... well, it's possible for v6 but would make it even more annoying to type v6 addresses out.

[Ambroos]

I guess there's a large pool of IP addresses used by residential ISPs that could be recycled relatively easily.

When I lived in Ireland I only got a public IPv6, my IPv4 was behind CG-NAT. The nerd in me wasn't a fan of that on paper, but in reality I didn't have any issues with it.

I could see ISPs making a quick buck by switching to CG-NAT on IPv4 so they can sell off their IPv4 blocks.

Those IPs being recycled for servers/services doesn't seem too risky, given that they're not typically hosting anything.

[JPDeckers]

Problem with CGNAT is the costs involved in bookkeeping for law enforcement.

Where an IPv4 solution for your clients only needs change-logging on IPbinding-to-client level, the CG-NAT requires you as an ISP to log every outgoing IPv4/port combination with timestamp to client mapping.

Which requires A LOT more storage and much more expensive equipment.

Going rate per IPv4 is up to $40 nowadays, selling of your v4 block might not be cost-efficient.

[minimaster]

Disclaimer: I work with this stuff and might be a little biased to certain vendor solutions.

A good CGNAT implementations have support for static blocks: the subscriber always ends up a a specific ipnumber+portblock combination. (Each subscriber is assigned a specific number of exit ports and this all just logged once during startup so you always know where each subscriber ends up).

Should they run out of their assigned portblock, there are pools which you can borrow from (these need then to be logged who borrowed at what time etc). So all in all there is less logging than when everything was dynamic.

[endre]

And law enforcement inquiries barely contain source port information, or precise time. Most of then go like: who had this IP in $this-two-weeks-window. No source port, no destination IP/port.

[t0mas88]

"We don't have the ability to determine a specific subscriber based on the information provided" and close the request.

[kazen44]

this is not how most of these laws works. As an ISP, you are required to have this bookkeeping, and are audited for it in (most) countries.

Usually, the law has specific procedures about how this information is requested, what responsibilities are with which party, and how long the response time should be for suchs a request.

When starting (or already being an ISP). You already know what kind of system you need to build that matches all these requirements by law. Simply saying, we do not have the required information wouldn't work because the law has very specific details about the requested information.*

* this is in a european country, so no clue if this is applicable to the US.

[philderbeast]

that will just lead to a whole lot of "we dont have that information" or alternativly, "all of these 10000 people used that, have fun!"

[floatboth]

And isn't that the privacy we all would really enjoy? :D

[IntelMiner]

The "I'm Spartacus!" of torrenting

(For those who haven't heard the reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKCmyiljKo0#t=0m40s )

[_Algernon_]

Anything that makes mass surveillance more expensive is a plus in my book.

[ButterWashed]

Whilst I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, all the costs an ISP might incur will almost certainly be passed into the consumer. We're paying to be surveilled in many different ways.

[technion]

I'm finding more and more that I go to some random website, and get a message about an IP ban. That or a 401 error with no context.

If cgnat keeps scaling, these ip Limiters need to phase out.

[p1mrx]

> If cgnat keeps scaling, these ip Limiters need to phase out.

This problem would be easy to solve, if only there were some way for a website operator to phase out CGNAT and see a user's 128-bit IP address instead...

[elithrar]

> I'm finding more and more that I go to some random website, and get a message about an IP ban. That or a 401 error with no context.

The association between IP and user/endpoint is changing, especially with the advent of Apple’s Private Relay, other privacy-protecting proxies, and increased CGNAT.

Website & hosting providers will have to adapt, but right now we’re certainly in a transition state.

[tbrownaw]

> Where an IPv4 solution for your clients only needs change-logging on IPbinding-to-client level, the CG-NAT requires you as an ISP to log every outgoing IPv4/port combination with timestamp to client mapping.

Why does each individual connection have to get a port from the global allocator, rather than any of the pooling or hierarchical techniques that high performance memory allocators use?

[netr0ute]

The allocators already use pooling, but there are only so many source ports to choose from.

[driverdan]

Even better idea, don't keep those logs in the first place. Tell LE you have nothing for them.

[einpoklum]

> WThe nerd in me wasn't a fan of that on paper, but in reality I didn't have any issues with it.

No issues? So, how are people supposed to be able to access your machine then?

[ithkuil]

Via the mentioned public IPv6 address

[globular-toast]

If all ISPs supported IPv6 this wouldn't even be news (well, it wouldn't even have happened).

[ithkuil]

Btw, what happened to teredo? Is there a working macos client?

[blntechie]

With ZeroTier, TailScale etc. just creating a personal network of your own should help solve the issue I guess.

[alephu5]

Ngrok if you only want TCP

[sp332]

I usually used Teamviewer.

[tehbeard]

Why should I want people to be accessing my personal desktop/laptop/tablet?

[edoceo]

It's cause you want to get to your home boxen from outside.

[chrisseaton]

Surely you know this is a super niche requirement?

You can use IP6 or a commercial rather than domestic ISP if you really need to do it.

[olyjohn]

It might not be so niche if we weren't all behind NAT firewalls. There would probably be a whole lot more applications that do direct connections between two people, and eliminate the middle-man. There's a reason every major service out there has their applications set up in some cloud to relay the messages back and forth between clients.

[dbmnt]

There are other solutions to this problem now. Tailscale comes to mind.

[sp332]

That was not the question, it said "people".

[chrisseaton]

Most domestic users don’t want or need this. If you’ve got a special requirement use a commercial ISP.

[globular-toast]

That makes me realise there is an incentive for ISPs to hold out on supporting IPv6. If IPv6 was widely supported then their IPv4 blocks would be worthless. I wonder how many will be holding out on deploying IPv6 until they can offload their still-valuable IPv4 addresses.

[littlecranky67]

IPv6 adoption is just sad. Sharing an anectode: Back in 2002, I was using a 56k modem on a linux box 24/7 from home with a dialup flatrate. Being an avid IRCnet user, I setup an IPv6 tunnel with a tunnel broker (I think it was Hurricane Electric - it was before Aiccu was a thing) and connected to the IPv6 IRCnet servers. There was once a channel #uptime which was a contest: On start of contest, everybody in channel got voice - and the person to last hold voice would win (you lose voice when your TCP connection disconnects). Even so I had a forced disconnect every 24h, amongst over 100 users (mostly Servers, Bouncers, Universities etc.) I ranked 6th place in the end (after couple of weeks), because my ipv4 dialup was reconnecting fast enough to receive the buffered ipv6 tunnel pakets from the broker. Today I have no more IPv6 since SIXXS shut its doors a couple of years back, and my provider (o2/Telefonica) hasn't roled it out to me yet.

Looking back those 19 years, the availability and state of IPv6 has worsened for me - even though IPv4 shortage was known back then.

[wvh]

Same story here. I think I had IPv6 around 2000 with HE and then SIXXS, and my university back then already assigned IPv6 addresses. Now in 2021, I don't think I have had an IPv6 address assigned either at home or at work for quite some time.

It's hard to understand why they don't just push through since there clearly are no real technical problems as witness by those few countries with major providers that actually actively use IPv6 (only).

[dehrmann]

I've had a static ipv4 address on a home internet connection for almost 10 years, now. They're out there...

[throwaway3b03]

I used to have that. Then all residential customers were put under a CGN, and you can ask for a dedicated, public IP, free of charge. I imagine 99.9% of users can't tell the difference so the ISP saved a lot of IP space, while customers are just as happy.

[phatfish]

Yup, ISPs in countries that got a nice big block if addresses in the early days can still manage this. I have a cable connection that was originally provided by NTL (now Virgin Media). My IPv4 address changes about once a year now as they do upgrades/maintenance. It used to change even less.

[2Gkashmiri]

I find the ipv6 address scary because IP geolocation gives that in the same city district. Cgnat would be better because the server would see ipv4 of the ISP. I don't know, is there a way to not show my ipv6 and fall back on cgnat address because that looks much more secure in terms of not getting doxed and ad tracked.

[tolien]

That’s not inherent to IPv6 though, your ISP chose to be more specific in the location data for those addresses. If it’s sufficiently detailed as to “dox” you, maybe ask them not to do that?

[wu_187]

Both AT&T and Comcast do this with IPv4 as well.

[tolien]

Yeah, NTL/Virgin Media in the UK do the same in that their IPs geolocate to where the node/head end is. In a city, it's not going to be specific enough to uniquely identify you but it's still weird seeing ads that aren't that far away.

On the other hand, the IPv4/v6 addresses on my A&A connection geolocate to either London or Bracknell (where their office is), about 400 miles away. I get a lot of pointless ads for things in Surrey that I have no intention of visiting.

[2Gkashmiri]

i have never used google search but the other day someone used that infront of me and on the bottom i saw what appeared to be "pin code for approximating your current location for local results" and something to that end. that scared me big time because this was like my home pin code, my small city has like 30 so this is narrowing me down to a single one which i am not comfortable with

[andruby]

I assume a vpn, ssh tunnel, wireguard or any other type of proxy would hide your residential ip.

[sp332]

Sure, just disable IPv6 support in your OS.

[2Gkashmiri]

apparently android doesnt allow that on wifi so out of luck.

[skuhn]

Public auctions (which they didn't use) are currently in the $45-50 per IP ballpark. At that price it's $247.5 million worth of IPs.

At auction the larger networks tend to go for less money per IP since there is a smaller market of people who want and can buy them (you have to be approved by ARIN/RIPE/etc. for the allocation size), which drives the price down.

[bgpdude]

The actual number is much higher. Amazon doesn’t publish all their IP addresses in that json, only the ones in use. They have almost double the IPv4 addresses, ie quite a bit reserved for future use. See https://toonk.io/aws-and-their-billions-in-ipv4-addresses/in...

[korethr]

What's the cutoff for larger networks where the price starts to go down? Would say, a /16 count? Or does that effect kick in as low as, say, a /20?

[skuhn]

I think that it starts to have downward pressure at /22 to /20. You can see Hilco's historicals at [1]. Not all purchases are done in public though.

It seems to me like an arbitrage opportunity, since /24 and /23 networks have many more potential buyers. But you have to be approved with a regional registry for the amount of space in order to buy it.

Observing things from the buy side, I suspect that IP space is being brought to auction in a slow but steady trickle so as to maintain upward momentum on prices. The price has approximately doubled in the last year.

[1] https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales

[oarsinsync]

> But you have to be approved with a regional registry for the amount of space in order to buy it.

This hasn’t been my experience in RIPEland since post IPv4-exhaustion. Is this an ARINism?

[skuhn]

That's my understanding with ARIN, yeah.

[Aeolun]

That’s not actually too expensive, considering they make that money back in a few months if all those IP’s are hosting even their smallest server.

[remram]

It's not like the news of "we have new IPs" instantly drive customers to rent more VMs. They are likely to have a lot of unused capacity for years, which is not paying back for itself.

[goodpoint]

> are we in danger of the cloud providers effectively being the Internet?

Between cloudflare and AWS/Azure/Google most of the Internet is an oligopoly right now.

Interesting how nobody else replied to this part of your comment.

[Frost1x]

Well, when the internet cartel pays your bills...

Technology certainly scaling and improving but it's being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. In the past I could compete with most sophisticated companies, it wasn't unattainable. Barrier to entry is simply too high now. No single or small team of developers and technologists is going to compete with AWS.

[MichaelZuo]

Wordpress?

[Ericson2314]

Yeah I would like the FTC go after new IPv4 deployments / mandate dual stack on anti-trust grounds.

[korethr]

That's an interesting idea. I don't know if the FTC has the authority to do so under the current powers given to it by Congress, and I don't know if I'd like the precedent of them trying without Congress so delegating that power. I'd be totally willing to discuss Congress delegating them said authority.

[IncRnd]

How does IPv4's use translate to anti-trust?

[usr1106]

Controlling 200 times more of a critical resource than the next competitor does not sound like healthy competition.

[IncRnd]

That you call global IPv4 addresses to be a critical resource is extremely odd. If I go to prudential.com or to another insurer's website, the IP delivery addressing protocol doesn't affect competition.

A user doesn't really see any difference when traffic gets delivered over IPv6 instead of IPv4, so the scarcity of the global IPv4 space is meaningless compared to the incredibly vast usable size of the global IP space.

[usr1106]

According to Google's statistics https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html over 65% cannot reach them via IPv6.

So offering any service just on IPv6 makes no sense in 99% of the cases. You can use if for some internal cases, if you can be sure that all your users have IPv6 wherever they happen to be.

If you are cloud provider and cannot offer your customers as many public IPv4 addresses as they want you are out of business.

[IncRnd]

Still, use of IPv4 does not constitute anti-trust.

[netr0ute]

That's if you can define IPV4 as a critical resource. But because anyone can assign any IPv4 address to anything and advertise it with BGP, it can't fit the definition of that.

[remram]

There would be penalties for that, maybe even legal ones. How easy it is to steal does not really factor in whether it's a critical resource.

[netr0ute]

Can it be defined as property? I could make a Internet The Second using isolated networks and advertise whatever I wanted. It's not like digital movies and music where it's defined as property under copyright law because it's a creative work.

[Ericson2314]

Promoting the continued dominance of a standard which causes artificial scarcity.

[j16sdiz]

I can't understand the reasoning here.

They need to go after other service provider, not isp. ISP provide CGNAT to facilitate access to ipv4 only service.

[Ericson2314]

Yeah I don't have much any problem with doing CGNat. We need to get the ISPs to do IPv6, and we need to penalize AWS when a customer chooses to do IPv4 only. (They will pass on the fee, which is just fine easier than going after the customers directly.)

[StreamBright]

IPv6 is trying to do too much in my opinion. This is partially why adoption is slower than it could be.

[kazen44]

in what way?

IPV6 is in many ways a simpeler protocol then IPv4. for instance, it has a significantly simpeler header then IPv4, it does not duplicate the broadcast behaviour of ethernet but relies on multicast instead.

Some parts of IPv6 are complex (mainly, IPsec) but those are not required to get an operational ipv6 network.

SLAAC & NDP are both significantly more simple then ARP and Automatic addressing under ipv4.

[IcePic]

Of course that is how it will end. Noone thinks that this is a bad idea, to only allow customers of those three to host a service, because that is the current mindset. When they own all the v4 ips, we will have no choice but to hot on their infra or not host at all.

At that time, someone might think that IPv6 with all its faults might have been a good idea after all, but then it will be too late, since "v4 seems to work, all clients behind 2-3-4 layers of NAT, everything tunneled in HTTP/4.5 on a single port outwards to your VPS/VPN".

Not being able to host a game on your home computer, not being able to start a service unless GCP/Azure/AWS allows you to will be the end of the internet as we used to know it. Extra fun for anyone not being american enough to want to be a customer of the big three.

[sigstoat]

> When they own all the v4 ips

... there won't be any value in them any more.

if the only folks left who can use IPv4 are the hosting providers ("big three" or not), then nobody will be using using IPv4 to contact all the hosted services.

large swaths of users have IPv6 available to them. if there starts being some inconvenience to not having 6, we can be sure adoption will pick up even faster.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

[IcePic]

>> When they own all the v4 ips >... there won't be any value in them any more.

and upto that point, it will be SUPER expensive for you to try to get one (or 256), which they can pay since they have monopoly on them, and you only needing one can't.

[liveoneggs]

ietf and friends could have made ipv6 only address the shortage but decided to change a bunch of other stuff too

[koksik202]

I wonder if we see large use of IPv4 and IPv6 adaptation how tricky it will be to adapt and be able to have enough FIB in boxes to hold all those resolutions I wonder how many companies will go into buying beefy chassis rather than implementing some some low level fragmentation for two families

[hamburgerwah]

Having just realized my internet provider, cox, does not actually support ipv6 for the 2 million plus subscribers in my state I think it is safe to say that ipv6 is dead and will never take the place of ipv4 in our lifetimes.

Don't get me wrong. They say they support it, they have lots of PR that says the support it but in fact as a subscriber they do not.

[deadmutex]

Ehn, I don't know if you can go from

"my internet provider, cox, does not actually support ipv6" to "I think it is safe to say that ipv6 is dead".

There are much more comprehensive ways to look at ipv6 adoption, e.g. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

[BikiniPrince]

Mine had some beta program years ago. You had to find a number to call which was hidden away in a locked filing cabinet hidden away in a disused lavatory.

They were purchased recently and maybe there is hope now.

[birdman3131]

Cox has had ipv6 for quite a while. Hell for a while they kept shutting down my ipv4 leaving me only with ipv6. That was fun to get through tech supports head. Took three times of that happening for a day or two before I finally got to a level 2/3 tech that at least understood what I was talking about.

[lashloch]

in our lifetimes. you don't think ipv6 will overtake ipv4 in the next 50-odd years? think about the year 1971 and what was thought possible then

[skuhn]

Overtake: yes.

The ability to launch a public-facing, commercial service and pretend like IPv4 never existed and you don't have to worry about it at all? Probably not within our lifetimes.

[cm2187]

I am not sure about that. When IPv6 support nears 95%, the pressure will be on those few ISPs to give access to those areas inaccessible from v4. Think of all these websites that need to be cheap and are happy enough with reaching 95% of the audience: blogs, small businesses, anything education related, etc. That should help going from 95 to 100.

[fake-name]

Where are you located?

I'm on cox in southern california, and they rolled out IPv6 some time in the last year or so.

[dboreham]

Same thing here with Spectrum.