5 ms·

Decades from now, the story of IPv6 will be a cautionary tale about the danger of ignoring incentives when enhancing open standards. So much of the spec seems

by m0dest 8y ago

Decades from now, the story of IPv6 will be a cautionary tale about the danger of ignoring incentives when enhancing open standards. So much of the spec seems to have been designed in an idealist vacuum that the promoters are blind to its own failures. The addresses are ugly and impossible to memorize but that shouldn't matter because... There are no performance advantages but that was out of scope because... There are few security advantages because that wasn't a core goal because... I'm not saying that we should give up on IPv6. But we should acknowledge that its slow adoption is entirely due to a standard that was poorly designed for the real needs of critical stakeholders and poorly marketed to everyone else.

rjsw 8y ago
There is one performance advantage, IPv6 requires one fewer checksum calculation on each packet.
kelnage 8y ago
Isn't the same true of HTTPS (first developed in 1994, but has only seen wide usage recently, outside of specific use-cases), or even programming languages like Python 3? At the end of the day, it seems to me that incumbent internet technologies that are widely used will always see slow incremental change to a new incompatible version, regardless of how small the changes or how many improvements there are, without significant and clear external incentives. Such incentives are very hard to manufacture - so foresight of upcoming issues (such as IPv4 address space depletion) will always seem premature until they actually occur. But it certainly doesn't make forward planning a bad idea.
olavk 8y ago
IPv6 was designed in the early 90'ies where the internet looked very different - this was even before the web. Large scale changes were much easier to coordinate and roll out. I dont think the players at that time needed incentives beyond knowing that the upgrade solved the address space problem. The problems of adoption can be compared to the Python 3 debacle. When Python 3 was first planned, Python were mostly used by enthusiasts which would be quick to adopt a new version - even if it had a few minor incompatible changes. But when the release finally rolled out, Python had become much more popular and entrenched and widely used by business and scientists which were more reluctant to adopt breaking changes.

by m0dest 8y ago

rjsw 8y ago

There is one performance advantage, IPv6 requires one fewer checksum calculation on each packet.

kelnage 8y ago

Isn't the same true of HTTPS (first developed in 1994, but has only seen wide usage recently, outside of specific use-cases), or even programming languages like Python 3? At the end of the day, it seems to me that incumbent internet technologies that are widely used will always see slow incremental change to a new incompatible version, regardless of how small the changes or how many improvements there are, without significant and clear external incentives. Such incentives are very hard to manufacture - so foresight of upcoming issues (such as IPv4 address space depletion) will always seem premature until they actually occur. But it certainly doesn't make forward planning a bad idea.

olavk 8y ago

IPv6 was designed in the early 90'ies where the internet looked very different - this was even before the web. Large scale changes were much easier to coordinate and roll out. I dont think the players at that time needed incentives beyond knowing that the upgrade solved the address space problem. The problems of adoption can be compared to the Python 3 debacle. When Python 3 was first planned, Python were mostly used by enthusiasts which would be quick to adopt a new version - even if it had a few minor incompatible changes. But when the release finally rolled out, Python had become much more popular and entrenched and widely used by business and scientists which were more reluctant to adopt breaking changes.