5 ms·

This will be controversial, but: I think the EU should set a deadline for IPv6 adoption to ISPs and impose fines afterwards. They seem to be legislating all kin

by franga2000 5y ago

This will be controversial, but: I think the EU should set a deadline for IPv6 adoption to ISPs and impose fines afterwards. They seem to be legislating all kinds of crazy things (like type C connectors), so it's quite within the realm of possibility, and unlike some other things, there really isn't a way they can screw this up. Rationale: It's in the custoners' best interest to have unique publically routable addresses and without IPv6 we'll be stuck with CGNAT. The providers don't care, because rollout is expensive. So, for the good of the customer, legislation with fines is needed to better align the financial incentives.

roenxi 5y ago
If it is good for a customer then the provider will care. The customer will switch ISPs to those that support IPv6. Then the IPv4-only providers will get less money.
- franga2000 5y ago
  Sure, if you ask an economist. But here in the real world, switching ISPs is hard (fees, lack of competition, replacing gear...) and the benefit of IPv6 isn't apparent yet to most people. By the time it becomes, it'll be too late and nobody will have it yet, so there won't be anywhere to switch anyways. There's a reason we have consumer protection regulation and much of it came as a result of situations where evryone thought, as you do, that the market/competition would solve the problem, but of course it didn't. That only happens in ideal markets where switching providers is trivial, the consumer is equally informed about all of them and the providers (and perhaps customers too) have equal economic power.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > But here in the real world... Your starting point was that any ISP who doesn't implement your preferred technical standard should be fined. With a disregard for whether IPv6 makes sense for them or their customers. You might detect a little pushback here on the idea that your ideas are real world. Laissez faire is a very practical approach. > By the time it becomes, it'll be too late and nobody will have it yet, so there won't be anywhere to switch anyways. A crisis so terrible I can't even imagine it. Nobody outside some fairly obscure tech circles would even notice. Imagine if they'd taken this approach rolling out IPv4 and weren't fast enough to change the legislation. The rollout of IPv6 would look really hard if IPv4 was a legislated requirement. The EU just isn't a competent technical standards body, and it has no business trying to be one because a couple of tech types like IPv6. > That only happens in ideal markets where switching providers is trivial... I switched providers to get IPv6 support. It was pretty trivial.
    - franga2000 5y ago
      > Your starting point was that any ISP who doesn't implement your preferred technical standard should be fined. "my preferred standard" == the only alternative to the current collapsing standard that has been agreed upon by industry leaders for some 20 years now. > With a disregard for whether IPv6 makes sense for them or their customers. IPv6 can't "not make sense", it can only "not be necessary yet". > A crisis so terrible I can't even imagine it. Nobody outside some fairly obscure tech circles would even notice. What, service costs going through the roof because the ISP now has to buy IPv4 addresses? Getting IP blocked from sites because the address you share with half the town got reported for spam? Not being able to access IPv6-only sites from smaller providers who can't afford to lease IPv4 addresses? And only then the ISPs start investing in it, which will take a few years to finish, all the while your service is shit? Pretty obscure, yeah. > I switched providers to get IPv6 support. It was pretty trivial. I've been trying to for several years and have not been able to for a multitude of reasons.
      - yyyk 5y ago
        >What, service costs going through the roof because the ISP now has to buy IPv4 addresses? If it was profitable, the ISP would do it and pocket the now unnecessary service costs. >Getting IP blocked from sites because the address you share with half the town got reported for spam? 99.9% people don't want to run their own SMTP server. It's an ultra-niche use case ISP don't care about. >Not being able to access IPv6-only sites from smaller providers who can't afford to lease IPv4 addresses? There aren't any. Look, it's just an internet addressing protocol, not something that justifies legislation.
        notriddle 5y ago
        > 99.9% people don't want to run their own SMTP server. It's an ultra-niche use case ISP don't care about. It's not SMTP. It's StopForumSpam and CloudFlare that you need to worry about.
        Dagger2 5y ago
        > If it was profitable, the ISP would do it and pocket the now unnecessary service costs. This is another "if you ask an economist" situation. In the real world, people will happily spend more effort justifying not doing v6 and working around problems caused by being v4-only than would be needed to just do v6. > 99.9% people don't want to run their own SMTP server. It's an ultra-niche use case ISP don't care about. This misses the point. It only takes one person behind CGNAT to get the CGNAT source IPs on a spam list, at which point it affects everyone. Plus spam exists on the web too, it's not an SMTP-only thing. > There aren't any. Which is exactly why it's so important to be deploying v6: so there can be v6-only sites. Or rather, more than there are at the moment, because they do exist. > Look, it's just an internet addressing protocol, not something that justifies legislation. I've seen an argument that it's already covered by existing legislation: the refusal of large/old providers to support v6, which forces the use of v4 which small/new providers can't get enough of, is beginning to look rather a lot like an abuse of market position. That would make it an anti-trust issue, which definitely falls within the remit of government.
- dtech 5y ago
  Only for spherical customers in a vacuum. IPv6 is one of those things you can't expect the average customer to care about, even though it's ultimately important for them.
- ivalm 5y ago
  At least in the US, residential ISPs are not a real market, many places just have one option.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  > The customer will switch ISPs to those that support IPv6. That assumes it's possible to switch ISPs. Where I live, within the city bounds of the capital of my country, there's only two ISPs that can deliver broadband service and neither do IPv6 properly.
kortilla 5y ago
> It's in the custoners' best interest to have unique publically routable addresses and without IPv6 we'll be stuck with CGNAT. This is absolutely not a given. IoT has drastically changed the equation on how good it is to have devices exposed to unsolicited ingress connections from the internet by default. This is speaking from experience of enabling ipv6 at an ISP. We were rewarded with: - happy geeks - anemic ipv6 usage - a bunch of abuse reports and customer support hours wasted on people with poorly configured IoT (or just old computers with no recent patches).
- detaro 5y ago
  There is a key difference between having IPv6 (good) and not having a firewall as default (bad). I guess if you have many customers that don't use provided-by-you CPE that can be an issue.
- znpy 5y ago
  There's a function in my ISP-provided internet router/gateway that allows me to disallow incoming connection on ipv6 address. I guess you should implement this too? If my understanding is correct, it's equivalent to using -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT in linux/iptables where -P DROP is the default input policy. Basically you allow ipv6 tcp traffic only for tcp connections initiated from within.
- ayushnix 5y ago
  We can either bury our heads in the sand, have a false sense of security behind CGNAT connections and keeping devices running without a firewall, commercialize IPv4 as much as possible to point of consuming loopback address spaces and make everything worse than it already is. Or, we can move to IPv6. Yes, it might be painful for some people when they get their IoT devices hacked but at least it should spur change and make people realize that they can't just buy a toaster and connect it to the Internet.
  - dcow 5y ago
    Any decent router with IPv6 support sets up stateful v6 firewall rules blocking incoming connections and only allowing outgoing from your v6 subnet. Same as always like you say and most consumers won’t even notice a difference other than increased throughout.
api 5y ago
Standards adoption is definitely an area where government incentives work.
- notriddle 5y ago
  Standards adoption shouldn't even be controversial, really. Fixing weights and measures has been government policy since time immemorial, as have street addresses, snail mail, and telephone. The idea that the internet should not involve the state is, honestly, pretty weird when you try comparing it to other stuff.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    > The idea that the internet should not involve the state is, honestly, pretty weird when you try comparing it to other stuff. The "inter" in internet implies that there is no single entity that administers it. It is a network of networks, based on cooperation. Although I agree in principal that enforcing standards has been (and arguably should be) in the domain of government functions, I feel the principal of keeping the "inter" in "internet" is more important. I'd love to see an incentivized conversion to IPv6, but there are many other incentivized conversions that I would wholly oppose. Thus I would prefer not to see government intervention in internet protocols.
    - notriddle 5y ago
      The metric system is also international. Doesn't stop governments from mandating its use, or defining their own standards in terms of metric.
      - dotancohen 5y ago
        Good point, thank you.

roenxi 5y ago

If it is good for a customer then the provider will care. The customer will switch ISPs to those that support IPv6. Then the IPv4-only providers will get less money.

franga2000 5y ago
Sure, if you ask an economist. But here in the real world, switching ISPs is hard (fees, lack of competition, replacing gear...) and the benefit of IPv6 isn't apparent yet to most people. By the time it becomes, it'll be too late and nobody will have it yet, so there won't be anywhere to switch anyways. There's a reason we have consumer protection regulation and much of it came as a result of situations where evryone thought, as you do, that the market/competition would solve the problem, but of course it didn't. That only happens in ideal markets where switching providers is trivial, the consumer is equally informed about all of them and the providers (and perhaps customers too) have equal economic power.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > But here in the real world... Your starting point was that any ISP who doesn't implement your preferred technical standard should be fined. With a disregard for whether IPv6 makes sense for them or their customers. You might detect a little pushback here on the idea that your ideas are real world. Laissez faire is a very practical approach. > By the time it becomes, it'll be too late and nobody will have it yet, so there won't be anywhere to switch anyways. A crisis so terrible I can't even imagine it. Nobody outside some fairly obscure tech circles would even notice. Imagine if they'd taken this approach rolling out IPv4 and weren't fast enough to change the legislation. The rollout of IPv6 would look really hard if IPv4 was a legislated requirement. The EU just isn't a competent technical standards body, and it has no business trying to be one because a couple of tech types like IPv6. > That only happens in ideal markets where switching providers is trivial... I switched providers to get IPv6 support. It was pretty trivial.
  - franga2000 5y ago
    > Your starting point was that any ISP who doesn't implement your preferred technical standard should be fined. "my preferred standard" == the only alternative to the current collapsing standard that has been agreed upon by industry leaders for some 20 years now. > With a disregard for whether IPv6 makes sense for them or their customers. IPv6 can't "not make sense", it can only "not be necessary yet". > A crisis so terrible I can't even imagine it. Nobody outside some fairly obscure tech circles would even notice. What, service costs going through the roof because the ISP now has to buy IPv4 addresses? Getting IP blocked from sites because the address you share with half the town got reported for spam? Not being able to access IPv6-only sites from smaller providers who can't afford to lease IPv4 addresses? And only then the ISPs start investing in it, which will take a few years to finish, all the while your service is shit? Pretty obscure, yeah. > I switched providers to get IPv6 support. It was pretty trivial. I've been trying to for several years and have not been able to for a multitude of reasons.
    - yyyk 5y ago
      >What, service costs going through the roof because the ISP now has to buy IPv4 addresses? If it was profitable, the ISP would do it and pocket the now unnecessary service costs. >Getting IP blocked from sites because the address you share with half the town got reported for spam? 99.9% people don't want to run their own SMTP server. It's an ultra-niche use case ISP don't care about. >Not being able to access IPv6-only sites from smaller providers who can't afford to lease IPv4 addresses? There aren't any. Look, it's just an internet addressing protocol, not something that justifies legislation.
      - notriddle 5y ago
        > 99.9% people don't want to run their own SMTP server. It's an ultra-niche use case ISP don't care about. It's not SMTP. It's StopForumSpam and CloudFlare that you need to worry about.
      - Dagger2 5y ago
        > If it was profitable, the ISP would do it and pocket the now unnecessary service costs. This is another "if you ask an economist" situation. In the real world, people will happily spend more effort justifying not doing v6 and working around problems caused by being v4-only than would be needed to just do v6. > 99.9% people don't want to run their own SMTP server. It's an ultra-niche use case ISP don't care about. This misses the point. It only takes one person behind CGNAT to get the CGNAT source IPs on a spam list, at which point it affects everyone. Plus spam exists on the web too, it's not an SMTP-only thing. > There aren't any. Which is exactly why it's so important to be deploying v6: so there can be v6-only sites. Or rather, more than there are at the moment, because they do exist. > Look, it's just an internet addressing protocol, not something that justifies legislation. I've seen an argument that it's already covered by existing legislation: the refusal of large/old providers to support v6, which forces the use of v4 which small/new providers can't get enough of, is beginning to look rather a lot like an abuse of market position. That would make it an anti-trust issue, which definitely falls within the remit of government.
dtech 5y ago
Only for spherical customers in a vacuum. IPv6 is one of those things you can't expect the average customer to care about, even though it's ultimately important for them.
ivalm 5y ago
At least in the US, residential ISPs are not a real market, many places just have one option.
magicalhippo 5y ago
> The customer will switch ISPs to those that support IPv6. That assumes it's possible to switch ISPs. Where I live, within the city bounds of the capital of my country, there's only two ISPs that can deliver broadband service and neither do IPv6 properly.

kortilla 5y ago

> It's in the custoners' best interest to have unique publically routable addresses and without IPv6 we'll be stuck with CGNAT. This is absolutely not a given. IoT has drastically changed the equation on how good it is to have devices exposed to unsolicited ingress connections from the internet by default. This is speaking from experience of enabling ipv6 at an ISP. We were rewarded with: - happy geeks - anemic ipv6 usage - a bunch of abuse reports and customer support hours wasted on people with poorly configured IoT (or just old computers with no recent patches).

detaro 5y ago
There is a key difference between having IPv6 (good) and not having a firewall as default (bad). I guess if you have many customers that don't use provided-by-you CPE that can be an issue.
znpy 5y ago
There's a function in my ISP-provided internet router/gateway that allows me to disallow incoming connection on ipv6 address. I guess you should implement this too? If my understanding is correct, it's equivalent to using -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT in linux/iptables where -P DROP is the default input policy. Basically you allow ipv6 tcp traffic only for tcp connections initiated from within.
ayushnix 5y ago
We can either bury our heads in the sand, have a false sense of security behind CGNAT connections and keeping devices running without a firewall, commercialize IPv4 as much as possible to point of consuming loopback address spaces and make everything worse than it already is. Or, we can move to IPv6. Yes, it might be painful for some people when they get their IoT devices hacked but at least it should spur change and make people realize that they can't just buy a toaster and connect it to the Internet.
- dcow 5y ago
  Any decent router with IPv6 support sets up stateful v6 firewall rules blocking incoming connections and only allowing outgoing from your v6 subnet. Same as always like you say and most consumers won’t even notice a difference other than increased throughout.

api 5y ago

Standards adoption is definitely an area where government incentives work.

notriddle 5y ago
Standards adoption shouldn't even be controversial, really. Fixing weights and measures has been government policy since time immemorial, as have street addresses, snail mail, and telephone. The idea that the internet should not involve the state is, honestly, pretty weird when you try comparing it to other stuff.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  > The idea that the internet should not involve the state is, honestly, pretty weird when you try comparing it to other stuff. The "inter" in internet implies that there is no single entity that administers it. It is a network of networks, based on cooperation. Although I agree in principal that enforcing standards has been (and arguably should be) in the domain of government functions, I feel the principal of keeping the "inter" in "internet" is more important. I'd love to see an incentivized conversion to IPv6, but there are many other incentivized conversions that I would wholly oppose. Thus I would prefer not to see government intervention in internet protocols.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    The metric system is also international. Doesn't stop governments from mandating its use, or defining their own standards in terms of metric.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      Good point, thank you.