4 ms·

I don't see a world where these compromises didn't exists and ipv6 would have been successful in rapidly replacing ipv4. The article seems to miss the forest fo

I don't see a world where these compromises didn't exists and ipv6 would have been successful in rapidly replacing ipv4. The article seems to miss the forest for the trees, trying to think technical problems that prevented deployment, when it was actually political ones. Nobody wanted to touch middleboxes, routers, etc. half of the internet is running on software that is 10 years old, trunk networking is several times older. Very reliable and known of all its quirks, so it's unlikely to be replaced. New ISP's are the most likely to deploy ipv6 natively, and such ISP have to compete with other new and old ISP. Consumers don't care as long as things work most of the times, which ipv4 is _good enough_. I would love to have a way to route my entire host to the internet, as it would make certain things easier, but I'm in the minority. Government policy could help ease the pain by requiring public institutions to implement it, but that's also a political problem.

magicalhippo 2y ago
> trying to think technical problems that prevented deployment, when it was actually political ones I'd say it's more human nature. We can see the problem looming in the horizon, we think we have some solution but implementing it will be painful now. However, the current solution isn't very painful yet, so it's better near-term to procrastinate. And so we postpone the change. If IPv4 had some flaws that seriously hurt back in the mid-90s, we'd surely be over on IPv6 or something else by now.