[tialaramex]

Same with Security Keys, there are a bunch of technologies like this, where you can literally write documentation explaining "This is what we did at our multi-billion dollar business to successfully solve the problem" and people will walk past, fingers stuffed in their ears, hoping that some day the problem will be solved somehow, but, like, magically without them having to change or learn. Just keep doing what they're doing and then, somehow magically it'll be fine. See also: Climate change.

[notreallyserio]

For most people, IPv4 is a solution to a problem that didn’t require change or learning. It’s just what is used behind the scenes to make the web and chat and email happen. And happen it all does, without trouble, so why lots of money to replace it?

What is the sales pitch you would bring to the CEO of a Fortune 500?

[throw0101a]

> What is the sales pitch you would bring to the CEO of a Fortune 500?

When you buy or merge companies, and they both have RFC 1918 addresses, you'll probably have a conflict between the two entities. You'll probably have to implement NAT with-in your own network and hope the two sides don't have to talk to each other that much. (Or you completely re-IP the acquisition.)

With IPv6, either the companies will be using their own PI IPv6 space and/or they will be using unique ULA prefixes, so the chance of conflicts will be very small.

This at least was one of the business cases for Wells Fargo, "the fourth largest bank in the United States by total assets and is one of the largest as ranked by bank deposits and market capitalization":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzTWjNUb4H4

[hansel_der]

for most companies the cost of an v6 transition is still greater than the cost of renumbering an aquisition.

[p1mrx]

Over time, ISPs are pushing more users to IPv6 + CGNATv4 because they don't have enough IPv4 addresses.

If an internet service needs to distinguish users by IP address, say for spam fighting reasons, then IPv6 will provide finer granularity because the addresses are not shared by multiple users. Depending on how the ISP implements CGNAT, IPv6 may also improve performance and geolocation accuracy.

(They'd also be doing those ISPs a favor, because offloading traffic to IPv6 lowers the operating costs of CGNAT.)

[dcow]

There isn't one until IPv6-only ISPs (or plans) pop up offering cheaper connectivity because you don't need an expensive v4 address. NAT sucks and everyone's job would be easier if they didn't have to deal with it, but the CEO likely doesn't care about that and probably just sees the "add IPv6 support" scope and cost estimate and NOPEs out.

I love IPv6 btw. I just don't think you'll see anything meaningful happen until FAANG drop IPv4 support. Imagine that. People would convert pretty quick if Google couldn't crawl your site or you couldn't buy an iPhone without IPv6...

[semi-extrinsic]

An IPv4 address still isn't very expensive. I'm paying about $1.30 per month to have a static IPv4 address from my home ISP.

[rnhmjoj]

That's not really the price of an IPv4 address: you don't have control over it, it's just not changing because they made a DHCP reservation or something. Owning an address means you can announce it to peers via BGP, set up PTR records, etc.

IPv4 addresses are expensive right now. Registries run out of new allocations years ago, so if you ask them you'll be put in a waiting list[1] hoping one for a block to be recovered. To get one right know you have to go on the market and negotiate a transfer: blocks are selling at ~50$/address right now. The price more than doubled in the last year or so: people are even speculating on it [2].

[1]: https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/ipv4/ipv4-pool

[2]: https://teddit.net/r/investing/comments/qdple3/i_am_planning...

[sedachv]

It's not just speculating, there is even large-scale IPv4 address allocation fraud going on:

https://www.internetgovernance.org/2021/08/19/a-fight-over-c...

[p1mrx]

Your ISP probably hasn't tried to acquire IPv4 addresses recently. https://ipv4.global/reports/ shows prices around $40/address, so it would take 2-3 years to break even at $1.30/month.

(Although, people rent apartments with break-even periods well beyond 10 years, so maybe 2-3 is still fine.)

[sedachv]

> There isn't one until IPv6-only ISPs (or plans) pop up offering cheaper connectivity because you don't need an expensive v4 address.

This has been happening for years with VPSes.

[Gigachad]

Consumer ISPs don't need an ip per customer. They just stick 1000 users on the same ip address behind CG-NAT