[apitman]

As sad as it makes me to admit, I don't think IPv6 is ever going to happen without government intervention. Adoption is flat at under 50% over the past year. IPv6 doesn't benefit big tech. SNI routing and NAT work pretty well for centralized platforms. AWS will gladly rent us IPv4 addresses until the end of time.

[toast0]

> IPv6 doesn't benefit big tech.

It does, and big tech has largely adopted IPv6.

For users with IPv6, the v6 path is often less constrained than then v4 path. Serving data faster/more consistently is of benefit to big tech. For a lot of users, v4 and v6 routing are different, which is also helpful for big tech. If you have two paths to the server (and happy eyeballs or something), you have more resiliance to routing issues.

Clouds are slow on v6, but CDNs are not. Adoption on eyeball networks has been very slow, and it's unlikely to speed up much, IMHO. The benefits of v6 for ISPs are not that big for established serviced with large v4 pools. For ISPs running CGNAT, more v6 means less CGNAT and CGNAT is a lot more expensive than plain ip routing. (Doesn't mean all CGNAT providers run v6, but it's an incentive).

[zekica]

SNI routing is such a bad way to do what should be L3 problem that people implemented PROXY protocol to send information about user's endpoint address without doing MITM.

[Dagger2]

The Internet itself is growing, so "50%" does still represent a growing number of users. Also Google's stats are missing half a billion v6 users from China.

[traderj0e]

Another way to do ipv6 without government intervention is to make it 1. actually what people want, just v4 with more bits 2. have a reasonable migration path from v4. They made something overcomplicated that disregards all existing users, and now they act like this was the only possible way to avoid address exhaustion and it's everyone's obligation to switch. Even if the govt successfully forced v6, it'd be a downgrade.

[Dagger2]

v6 mostly is just v4 with more bits, and it has a reasonable migration path from v4 too. I don't think a more reasonable migration path is even possible given the constraints of v4.

About the only thing new in v6 that's not already in v4 is SLAAC, which isn't very complicated. Routing works the same, the addresses work the same, DNS, TCP, firewalling etc all work the same. If anything they removed complexity by dropping broadcast and making NAT unnecessary.

People just have some very weird misconceptions about v6, and will frequently argue that e.g. it was badly designed for not doing a thing that it does actually do, or for not doing something impossible.

[traderj0e]

The biggest thing is all the v4 addresses are no longer valid in v6. They had a choice and went with making a separate parallel network with new routes. This means DNS DHCP etc work similarly but are completely different, and the separation between DNS v4 and v6 of course is never clear in any router UI, network config file, etc. And the routes themselves are different.

SLAAC itself isn't complicated, but it means introducing multiple kinds of addresses, which is complicated. Privacy addresses were the latest thing. The history of this has left the defaults in a wacky state, like I got a new router and idk what to expect if I enable v6 on it. Even disabled v6 on my laptop cause idk what it'll do when I join someone else's network. Default should've just been DHCP+NAT from the start, not a loaded gun aimed at foot.

And SLAAC means random addresses that are human-unreadable. "Just use DNS" but nah, nobody will do that.

[Dagger2]

  ::203.0.113.42 (tunnels to 203.0.113.42 over v4)
  ::ffff:203.0.113.42 (opens a v4 connection via an AF_INET6 socket)
  64:ff9b::203.0.113.42 (translates to v4 at nearest NAT64 point)

What are these then? Also, it's not like they had a choice here. v4 is hardcoded to 32 bits, so the option of making a single network with a bigger address size wasn't available.

I think I can count that as falling under both "something it already does" and "something that's impossible".

Your laptop will just get some IPs as appropriate for the network it's on, and then it'll use them. You don't need to think hard about it.