[hkt]

There needs to be a body of law relating to technical matters like this (and interoperability etc) that is adjacent to competition law. Some things we just need everyone to be on the same page about. It is manifestly the case that ipv6 is never going to be that, because the incentives to invest simply don't exist for companies like AWS.

This distorts the market in eyeball networks and hosting - the former are under little pressure to offer v6, and new entrants to the latter can only offer v6. Competition law in the EU works (I think?) on the principles of consumer benefit and market fairness. On that basis, I'm left wondering why this has never been pursued by the EU's competition authorities.

[jeroenhd]

The EU did have a mandate for government services to use IPv6, but the programme it was part of got replaced by another that didn't include IPv6.

The European Commission did advocate for IPv6 use, but, the EU being the EU, motivated their recommendation by complaining that law enforcement had issues tracking down people behind CGNAT, and made clear that they wanted every IP address to point to a specific person for law enforcement reasons.

So, yeah, I don't think we should let the EU deal with the specifics of network infrastructure just yet.

I think it's hard to make an economic argument for IPv6. Yes, it's obviously a superior technology, but ISPs can CGNAT for cheap, consumers can still access every server, and the €40 per year a business needs to pay for an IPv4 address isn't exactly breaking the bank either.

Perhaps the EU should force the issue, but I think countries like Lithuania ,where there is practically no IPv6 available (0.58%, according to https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6-zoom, but who knows how accurate that is), will protest any mandate that will force their ISPs to buy new networking equipment.

[betaby]

> ISPs can CGNAT for cheap

Not really that cheap. While CPAEX is CAPEX, OPEX is still a thing and operating CGNAT requires efforts. Also some (most?) CGNAT implementations are buggy and is not a good user experience, even for users who don't understand the concept of IP at all.

[jeroenhd]

> Also some (most?) CGNAT implementations are buggy and is not a good user experience, even for users who don't understand the concept of IP at all.

They're a pain, especially when you're visiting a website with CAPTCHAs, but the money they save on buying IP space seems to be worth the bad experience from an ISP point of view.

Even here in the Netherlands, with its relatively high wages, a fiber ISP decided to use CGNAT on their new fiber networks as a cost-cutting measure. Luckily, customers can disable CGNAT in their online control panel, but the cost cutting measure seems to be worth the annoyed customers from that company's perspective at least. Of course they also didn't roll out IPv6.

[Tijdreiziger]

Assuming you’re referring to Delta/Caiway… I think they’re expanding quite quickly, considering both started out as smaller local ISPs; so it’s probably between CGNAT and having to acquire IP space for them.

The fact that they’re owned by an investment fund also makes them probably very focused on profitability.

As a point of comparison, the other players aggressively rolling out fiber (KPN, ODF/Odido) have been nationwide ISPs since the 90s, and they aren’t doing CGNAT AFAIK (so they probably aren’t hurting for IP space).

[jeroenhd]

I fully understand their choice to default to CGNAT because of their rapid expansion and the lack of available IPv4 space. However, if they have the money to invest in ISP grade CGNAT equipment, adding IPv6 shouldn't be a big problem.

Ziggo's DS-Lite, which also CGNATs IPv4 traffic, is annoying but at least you get a normal IPv6 subnet. This would've been a much better solution looking forward.

Dutch ISPs in general have plenty of space. Dutch ISPs has 53 million IPv4 addresses for a country of 18 million according to the first result on Google. Every person in every household can have a home connection and two servers without anyone lacking IPv4 addressing if these addresses were all pooled together.

However, there's no guarantee that things will stay this way. Like I said, Ziggo already does a form of CGNAT, and as the price of IPv4 addresses keeps rising, I expect more cheap providers to start selling off address space. KPN will stick to normal IPv4 for a while, but I don't trust super cheap companies like Odido to have the benefit of the consumer in mind, especially after trying to route all traffic through their affiliated German exchange instead of AMS-IX a while back. Odido is owned by an American fund as well (which is why they had to change their name), as is VodafoneZiggo.

[mschuster91]

> ISPs can CGNAT for cheap

The problem is customers don't like CGNAT. You can't run Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch in network mode as a host if you don't place the Switch as a catch-all in the DMZ.

Wish I were joking here - especially due to the security risk involved in running something in all-ports-open on the Internet - but Nintendo doesn't seem to (want to) run STUN/TURN servers.

[jeroenhd]

Nintendo's hilariously bad Switch networking guides ("to make games work, forward ports 1-65535 to your switch") are more of a Nintendo problem than a CGNAT problem. Normally I'm all for blaming CGNAT for shitty internet issues, but Nintendo is at fault this time, and ISPs should rightly tell their customers to ask Nintendo to get its shit together. Even without CGNAT, STUN/TURN is important to get peer to peer connections working.

CGNAT brings tons of issues, but following Amazon's pricing model, I don't think consumers would be willing to pay $4 a month to rent an IP address. Better to sigh and shrug at the two of three games and programs that don't work than to spend $48 a year, especially with the current cost of living being on the rise.

[mschuster91]

> Normally I'm all for blaming CGNAT for shitty internet issues, but Nintendo is at fault this time, and ISPs should rightly tell their customers to ask Nintendo to get its shit together. Even without CGNAT, STUN/TURN is important to get peer to peer connections working.

I agree with you, but it doesn't change reality... Nintendo doesn't give a fuck and (from hearsay) people with Nintendo Switches make up a huge proportion of service calls from customers that want CGNAT disabled and pay for a legitimate IP address.

[pantalaimon]

Is there any networking equipment that was sold in the last 10 years that does not support IPv6?

[jeroenhd]

I don't have a complete overview of the industry, but there were at least one or two Ubiquity gateways that didn't support hardware accelerated IPv6 routing. I also read about a lineup of Microtik switches that got updates to enable IPv6 hardware offloading this year.

Perhaps the enterprise side of networking is better about this stuff, but I doubt it if my experiences with other enterprise products is anything to go by.

The packets routed by these devices will end up at their destination, but at very low speeds.

[robertlagrant]

Lots of AWS customers want IPv4 because that's what they know, and that's what they benefit from.

To me, the question is: what stops me today from spinning up an IPv6-only website and having 99% of the world's browsers use it? If the answer is "nothing", then AWS shouldn't be forced to offer IPv6 (or only IPv6) - IPv4 is just part of what they offer customers. If the answer is "these 7 things" then those 7 things need to be fixed[0] before we pay civil servants to try and force companies to do things that they barely understand.

[0] E.g. in the UK, it's some of the big ISPs that don't do IPv6, so there's no point forcing someone way upstream (and way more optional) in the process to do something https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/11/update-on-ipv6...