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IPv6 will never happen without someone forcing hands of big corps and ISPs to switch to Ipv6. Imagine all social media and streaming services, disable ipv4 wit

IPv6 will never happen without someone forcing hands of big corps and ISPs to switch to Ipv6. Imagine all social media and streaming services, disable ipv4 within a month. These are not critical services but still will force ISPs to make the switch.

korethr 5y ago
Years ago, when I perhaps more naively believed in the benevolence of Google, and that wisdom of the Elder True Nerds who worked there would lead us to The Future, I might have applauded them throwing their weight around doing something like that. Possibly with a condescending paternalistic attitude like, "dragging the unwashed masses kicking and screaming into the the future they're too stupid to realize just yet that this will be better for them." I am no longer so young and naive. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that such a move by Google or the other tech giants would not be made out of benevolence, but because by doing so, somehow, would net them yet greater control over the flow of information across the world. Whether out of an authoritarian desire architect society the right way this time, or chasing their profit margin as far down the asymptote as they can measure, the resultant 1st through Nth order effects would probably be the same for the rest of us.
- corty 5y ago
  Control is one argument, but I'd go with the money argument: All the big cloud providers like Google and AWS as well as the small ones like Hetzner do have an incentive to keep IPv4 going as long as possible. They can charge a premium for things IPv4 "because addresses are scarce". Charging a premium means more profit margin. At the same time, they do not need to invest in more than lip service for IPv6 support in their offerings: No cloud provider has any comprehensive IPv6 offering, most services don't do IPv6. The edge ones maybe do, but there are always sharp edges, missing docs and general pain, pushing everyone back to IPv4 where the profits are.
bpodgursky 5y ago
I thought ISPs were actually doing pretty well? Big corps are moving slowly but I think it's mostly limited to internal NATted networks, which frankly nobody has an incentive to upgrade. We're getting there... slowly.
skuhn 5y ago
I actually think that what will really drive IPv6 adoption is if the price of IPv4 space continues its upward trajectory unabated. The price has about doubled at auction in the last year. How are those two things related? 1. There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space. Any company (not doing cloud hosting or network transit) that's holding a /8 is almost certainly using it very inefficiently, but an owner like Apple will never feel financial pressure to optimize or sell their /8. However, an owner like the university I went to (with a /16 network currently worth $3 million) will eventually face internal pressure to sell that network when the value rises to say $50 million. As another example, Yahoo is currently announcing subnets containing 4.3 million IPv4 addresses, which is worth $193.5mm at auction. If the price of IPv4 addresses increased by say 10x, their IPv4 space would probably comprise the bulk of the company's value. 2. Owners will need to adopt IPv6 in order to realize these financial gains. In order to sell a significant portion of their IPv4 space, an owner will have to compact their IPv4 usage into a much smaller space and migrate everything else to IPv6. This will be a huge undertaking for a lot of these places, but at some point it's worth it. By doing that, IPv6 adoption increases. There is the potential for a feedback loop to be created where demand for IPv4 drops and the prices decline and so fewer conversions are done, but I tend to believe that IPv4 pricing will remain inelastic. So basically the invisible hand of the market may guide us to IPv6, but I highly highly doubt we will have seen the last of IPv4 even decades from now.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space. This includes AWS, btw. You effectively get a public IPv4 with your instance, regardless of your actual needs. It actually increases your costs to get cloud instances that don't do that.
  - skuhn 5y ago
    AWS has that inefficiency baked in to their design, but I'm guessing that they do efficiently deploy their IPv4 space. That is still a problem for sure, but I thinking of places doing things like giving a printer its own subnet just because they have no incentive to be efficient.
viraptor 5y ago
The funny thing is social media and streaming is already there: facebook.com has IPv6 address 2a03:2880:f119:8083:face:b00c:0:25de instagram.com has IPv6 address 2406:da00:ff00::23ae:4dc1 snapchat.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:4802:36::15 netflix.com has IPv6 address 2600:1f14:62a:de82:822d:a423:9e4c:da8d youtube.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4006:810::200e The holdouts are somewhere else. Imagine if cloudflare and cloudfront defaulted to enabling ipv6 - I expect the jump in worldwide ipv6 traffic would be massive. On the other hand the missing services are very tech oriented: github.com has no AAAA record Once traffic can default to ipv6, we'll see ipv4 slowly dying, but the defaults really matter.
- jgrahamc 5y ago
  We do default IPv6 on. https://blog.cloudflare.com/always-on-ipv6/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/always-on-ipv6/ And the chart in that blog shows the dent we made.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    My bad, should've been more clear - yes, it's the default in some places. What I meant is actually treating ipv6 as first class everywhere. For example: This guide doesn't even mention AAAA records: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-records/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-records/ API examples are ipv4 unless the option takes ipv6 only: https://api.cloudflare.com/#dns-records-for-a-zone-update-dns-record https://api.cloudflare.com/#dns-records-for-a-zone-update-dn... Your terraform examples use ipv4 only: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflare/latest/docs/resources/record https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflar... https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflare/latest/docs/resources/ip_list https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflar... And many others. In other words, I expect steering people to do ipv6, then maybe ipv4 as well rather than the opposite would give the internet as a whole another big jump in ipv6 usage.
  - glogla 5y ago
    Nice, good work!
  - 5y ago
fulafel 5y ago
I think the "switch" mental model is misleading. IPv6 has already happened, and most users don't notice it since they aren't in the habit of looking at network interface diagnostics on their device. See eg sibling comment about instagram, netflix, facebook etc. v4 NAT will remain in use concurrently and services will remain available over v4 for consumer facing things for a long time.
Aeolun 5y ago
I will never be able to use IPv6 without someone making those things easier to read. I can barely remember a IPv4 address, but v6 is just insane.
- hohl 5y ago
  Lucky you, somebody already did that for you. It‘s called DNS. :P On a more serious node: IPv6 can be short and if used right they are actually short. Unfortunately, people continue not to care about relearning their habits and treat IPv6 as if it‘s a 1:1 replacement of IPv4 (you can even see it in this threat when people ask „why would you need more than a /64“). A major blocker in IPv6 aren‘t just the IPs but that all sys admins out there are trained to treat IPs as they got used to from the v4 world and can‘t stop to think of them as scarce resources instead of applying a hierarchical approach.
wu_187 5y ago
This. I honestly think the FCC will have to mandate it's adoption and give a hard date for the termination of IPv4 for it to work. Both will need to occur.
- christophilus 5y ago
  Hopefully, that is more successful than the time the US mandated the use of the metric system.
umanwizard 5y ago
> IPv6 will never happen without someone forcing hands of big corps and ISPs to switch to Ipv6. But it is happening. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html shows it slowly but steadily increasing.

korethr 5y ago

Years ago, when I perhaps more naively believed in the benevolence of Google, and that wisdom of the Elder True Nerds who worked there would lead us to The Future, I might have applauded them throwing their weight around doing something like that. Possibly with a condescending paternalistic attitude like, "dragging the unwashed masses kicking and screaming into the the future they're too stupid to realize just yet that this will be better for them." I am no longer so young and naive. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that such a move by Google or the other tech giants would not be made out of benevolence, but because by doing so, somehow, would net them yet greater control over the flow of information across the world. Whether out of an authoritarian desire architect society the right way this time, or chasing their profit margin as far down the asymptote as they can measure, the resultant 1st through Nth order effects would probably be the same for the rest of us.

corty 5y ago
Control is one argument, but I'd go with the money argument: All the big cloud providers like Google and AWS as well as the small ones like Hetzner do have an incentive to keep IPv4 going as long as possible. They can charge a premium for things IPv4 "because addresses are scarce". Charging a premium means more profit margin. At the same time, they do not need to invest in more than lip service for IPv6 support in their offerings: No cloud provider has any comprehensive IPv6 offering, most services don't do IPv6. The edge ones maybe do, but there are always sharp edges, missing docs and general pain, pushing everyone back to IPv4 where the profits are.

bpodgursky 5y ago

I thought ISPs were actually doing pretty well? Big corps are moving slowly but I think it's mostly limited to internal NATted networks, which frankly nobody has an incentive to upgrade. We're getting there... slowly.

skuhn 5y ago

I actually think that what will really drive IPv6 adoption is if the price of IPv4 space continues its upward trajectory unabated. The price has about doubled at auction in the last year. How are those two things related? 1. There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space. Any company (not doing cloud hosting or network transit) that's holding a /8 is almost certainly using it very inefficiently, but an owner like Apple will never feel financial pressure to optimize or sell their /8. However, an owner like the university I went to (with a /16 network currently worth $3 million) will eventually face internal pressure to sell that network when the value rises to say $50 million. As another example, Yahoo is currently announcing subnets containing 4.3 million IPv4 addresses, which is worth $193.5mm at auction. If the price of IPv4 addresses increased by say 10x, their IPv4 space would probably comprise the bulk of the company's value. 2. Owners will need to adopt IPv6 in order to realize these financial gains. In order to sell a significant portion of their IPv4 space, an owner will have to compact their IPv4 usage into a much smaller space and migrate everything else to IPv6. This will be a huge undertaking for a lot of these places, but at some point it's worth it. By doing that, IPv6 adoption increases. There is the potential for a feedback loop to be created where demand for IPv4 drops and the prices decline and so fewer conversions are done, but I tend to believe that IPv4 pricing will remain inelastic. So basically the invisible hand of the market may guide us to IPv6, but I highly highly doubt we will have seen the last of IPv4 even decades from now.

zozbot234 5y ago
> There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space. This includes AWS, btw. You effectively get a public IPv4 with your instance, regardless of your actual needs. It actually increases your costs to get cloud instances that don't do that.
- skuhn 5y ago
  AWS has that inefficiency baked in to their design, but I'm guessing that they do efficiently deploy their IPv4 space. That is still a problem for sure, but I thinking of places doing things like giving a printer its own subnet just because they have no incentive to be efficient.

viraptor 5y ago

The funny thing is social media and streaming is already there: facebook.com has IPv6 address 2a03:2880:f119:8083:face:b00c:0:25de instagram.com has IPv6 address 2406:da00:ff00::23ae:4dc1 snapchat.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:4802:36::15 netflix.com has IPv6 address 2600:1f14:62a:de82:822d:a423:9e4c:da8d youtube.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4006:810::200e The holdouts are somewhere else. Imagine if cloudflare and cloudfront defaulted to enabling ipv6 - I expect the jump in worldwide ipv6 traffic would be massive. On the other hand the missing services are very tech oriented: github.com has no AAAA record Once traffic can default to ipv6, we'll see ipv4 slowly dying, but the defaults really matter.

jgrahamc 5y ago
We do default IPv6 on. https://blog.cloudflare.com/always-on-ipv6/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/always-on-ipv6/ And the chart in that blog shows the dent we made.
- viraptor 5y ago
  My bad, should've been more clear - yes, it's the default in some places. What I meant is actually treating ipv6 as first class everywhere. For example: This guide doesn't even mention AAAA records: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-records/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-records/ API examples are ipv4 unless the option takes ipv6 only: https://api.cloudflare.com/#dns-records-for-a-zone-update-dns-record https://api.cloudflare.com/#dns-records-for-a-zone-update-dn... Your terraform examples use ipv4 only: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflare/latest/docs/resources/record https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflar... https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflare/latest/docs/resources/ip_list https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cloudflare/cloudflar... And many others. In other words, I expect steering people to do ipv6, then maybe ipv4 as well rather than the opposite would give the internet as a whole another big jump in ipv6 usage.
- glogla 5y ago
  Nice, good work!
- 5y ago

fulafel 5y ago

I think the "switch" mental model is misleading. IPv6 has already happened, and most users don't notice it since they aren't in the habit of looking at network interface diagnostics on their device. See eg sibling comment about instagram, netflix, facebook etc. v4 NAT will remain in use concurrently and services will remain available over v4 for consumer facing things for a long time.

Aeolun 5y ago

I will never be able to use IPv6 without someone making those things easier to read. I can barely remember a IPv4 address, but v6 is just insane.

hohl 5y ago
Lucky you, somebody already did that for you. It‘s called DNS. :P On a more serious node: IPv6 can be short and if used right they are actually short. Unfortunately, people continue not to care about relearning their habits and treat IPv6 as if it‘s a 1:1 replacement of IPv4 (you can even see it in this threat when people ask „why would you need more than a /64“). A major blocker in IPv6 aren‘t just the IPs but that all sys admins out there are trained to treat IPs as they got used to from the v4 world and can‘t stop to think of them as scarce resources instead of applying a hierarchical approach.

wu_187 5y ago

This. I honestly think the FCC will have to mandate it's adoption and give a hard date for the termination of IPv4 for it to work. Both will need to occur.

christophilus 5y ago
Hopefully, that is more successful than the time the US mandated the use of the metric system.

umanwizard 5y ago

> IPv6 will never happen without someone forcing hands of big corps and ISPs to switch to Ipv6. But it is happening. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html shows it slowly but steadily increasing.