[zokier]

As the authors themselves note, RFC 1597 was merely formalizing already widespread common practice. If the private ranges were not standardized then people would still have created private networks, but just used some random squatted blocks. I can not see that being better outcome.

[wongarsu]

The optimist in me wants to claim that not assigning any range for local networks would have lead to us running out of IPv4 addresses in the late 90s, leading to the rapid adoption of IPv6, along with some minor benefits (merging two private networks would be trivial, much fewer NATs in the world leading to better IP based security and P2P connectivity).

The realists in me expects that everyone would have used one of the ~13 /8 blocks assigned to the DoD

[jvanderbot]

The realist in me thinks that we'd probably have had earlier adoption of V6 but the net good from that is nil compared to the headaches.

V6 is only good when V4 is exhausted, so it's tautological to call it a benefit of earlier exhaustion of V4, or am I missing something? I'm probably missing something.

[saghm]

I'm guessing the reason they think it would have been better is that right now the headaches are from us being a weird limbo state where we're kinda out of IPv4 addresses but also not really at the point where everything supports IPv6 out of necessity. If the "kinda" were more definitive, there would potentially have been enough of a forcing factor that everyone make sure to support IPv6, and the headaches would have been figured out.

[connicpu]

CGNAT is playing a big role. More and more people across the planet are sharing an IPv4 address with dozens or even hundreds of other customers of their ISPs.

[Ericson2314]

Agreed.

Also, fun fact, the Google IPv6 tracker says we're about to reach 50%. Time to throw s party!

[throw0101d]

> 50%

As global average: some countries are above 50% already. (Mobile devices are probably a big part of that.)

[zokier]

Cloudflare Radar has separate mobile vs desktop ipv6 adoption stats. Globally mobiles have 45% ipv6, desktops 37%. In US mobiles have 60% vs desktops 46%

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=i...

[Ericson2314]

Yup! Least bad thing about smartphones, lol.