[jhugo]

AFAIK their policy is to block IPs that "obscure individual users". Another commenter quoted:

> Communities typically block edits from IP addresses that obscure individual users.

Surely they are aware that this is basically all IPs nowadays...?

If that's genuinely the policy then it should be almost equivalent to just requiring an account for all edits, so why not just do that?

[gnfargbl]

> Surely they are aware that this is basically all IPs nowadays...?

There are indeed many classes of IP address which multiplex large numbers of users (mobile network exits, VPN exits, ISPs with CGNAT, some corporate web filtering systems, shared public wifi, tor, satellite ground station exits, residential proxies, ...).

However, claiming that "basically all" IPs are multiplexed is definitely wrong. A home or small office broadband line typically gets a dynamic-but-ephemerally-unique IP, same as it always did.

The effect of IPv6 on this isn't totally clear to me yet. If anything, as IPv6 deployment among ISPs increases, the trend seems to be for less multiplexing and not more.

[jhugo]

> However, claiming that "basically all" IPs are multiplexed is definitely wrong. A home or small office broadband line typically gets a dynamic-but-ephemerally-unique IP, same as it always did.

IPs assigned to homes and small offices are still multiplexed. It's just a case of magnitude. (In other words, it's rare for a home or small office to contain just a single person.)

The policy as stated makes no sense, if they intend for it to be something like "more than 5 people per IP" they should just say so.

> The effect of IPv6 on this isn't totally clear to me yet. If anything, as IPv6 deployment among ISPs increases, the trend seems to be for less multiplexing and not more.

FWIW, every ISP I've used in the last ~10 years has delegated me an IPv6 prefix, resulting in each device in the network getting a unique IPv6 address. I've never seen any kind of NAT used in the wild for residential IPv6.

[gnfargbl]

You're absolutely correct. But: Wikipedia aren't trying to ban all multiplexed IPs. Instead, they're seeking to ban the IPs that bad actors disproportionately use -- and those are the heavily multiplexed ones.

It's kind of the internet equivalent of keeping drug dealers out of your club by banning anyone who lives in a poor area. A lazy (and likely discriminatory) policy, but a simple one, and effective.

[jrockway]

Is that true? I've worked at two ISPs and we never made an effort to make the IPs ephemeral. (OK, at the second ISP we didn't even have DHCP servers. We made everyone set up every device on their own!)

My current home broadband setup gives me the same IP address for months at a time, across router reboots. Advertisers love it, I'm sure.

[gnfargbl]

That's a great point and very fairly made. For my own ISP (BT in the UK), I get a new IP on each router reboot. I understand that for some others like Virgin, the IP is very stable over long periods.

[naoqj]

For most ISPs making IPs ephemeral is the only solution to the scarcity of IP addresses. You don't want IPs allocated to people who have turned off their routers.

[jhugo]

That doesn't require you to deliberately assign a new IP every time the router reboots, it just requires you to be able to re-use IPs without an active DHCP lease.

In practice customers don't usually turn their routers off for very long, and many ISPs don't have an acute shortage of IPs (those that do have already moved to CGNAT), so it's pretty typical to keep your IP no matter how many times you reboot your router. If I'd leave it off for a month I'd be less sure I'd get the same IP.

[m-p-3]

> AFAIK their policy is to block IPs that "obscure individual users". Another commenter quoted:

> > Communities typically block edits from IP addresses that obscure individual users.

> Surely they are aware that this is basically all IPs nowadays...?

> If that's genuinely the policy then it should be almost equivalent to just requiring an account for all edits, so why not just do that?

With the shortage of IPv4 addresses and the lack of progression to IPv6 from many ISPs, we're likely going to see users unable to anonymously edit if they start blocking those behind a CGNAT.