> What are the practical implications for internet users and infrastructure maintainers? There are technical implications on routing and "what is on the intern

> What are the practical implications for internet users and infrastructure maintainers? There are technical implications on routing and "what is on the internet" vs "connected to the internet" (the difference between having an address vs a NAT gateway for access). But for India specifically, the difference is more political & specifically for the internal cloud infra land. IPv4 was "sold & bought" during the era when US and Europe controlled who got how much. See the xkcd for an idea of the distribution - https://xkcd.com/195/ https://xkcd.com/195/ If you are a up&coming cloud provider in India, you definitely have a scarcity of ipv4 addresses you can hand out to your customers - you can hand out ipv6 addresses no problem, but if people's devices are on ipv4, then this is behind the scenes and needs a fair amount of complexity. You can do several tricks on the hosting side with DNS and SNI (so thousands of domain names can map to a group of 10-15 IP addresses and the loadbalancer can use the SNI to route the connections to the right internal ipv6). So IPv6 adoption for cellphones for instance is not really important for the clients on phones, but it really matters if you want to build out a cloud infra stack hosted in India by a provider (like Reliance) who doesn't own enough ipv4 ranges to scale up things.