No IPv6 by design to increase reliability...

Thu Jan 17 22:17:46 UTC 2019

> On Jan 17, 2019, at 12:40 PM, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
> 
> In article <39BFCD05-62CB-46C7-83E6-0CC25D393137 at delong.com> you write:
>> If v6 were such a problem as described, I think it wouldn’t be so readily embraced by facebook, google, Comcast, Netflix, etc. 
> 
> Their priorities are probably not your priorities.  For example, I
> expect they want to be able to distinguish among the devices behind a
> v4 NAT so they can segment and market more precisely.

That’s already relatively easy to do through other mechanisms (cookies anyone).

Having had in depth conversations with the people running those networks, I can assure you that a number of their priorities are in line with mine: a stable, functional internet that can accommodate existing users and scale for a workable future.

That simply isn’t possible in IPv4. It hasn’t been for years. IPv4 continues to degrade. Eventually it will reach a point where the problems are so obvious that they can no longer be ignored by the laggards that still haven’t implemented IPv6.

One of several things will eventually resolve that issue:

	1.	The remaining content providers failing to support IPv6 become sufficiently insignificant that ISPs turning off
		IPv4 will consider the revenue lost by losing customers that care to be significantly less than the cost to continue
		supporting IPv4 for those customers.

	2.	Enough eyeball ISPs will begin charging a premium for IPv4 services to cover the growing cost of maintaining this
		backwards compatibility that it drives a user revolt against the sites described in the previous paragraph, thus
		accelerating situation 1 above.

	3.	A sufficient critical mass of eyeballs are connected to IPv6 only networks that don’t offer IPv4 backwards compatibility
		that the content providers that fail to support them recognize significant revenue drop.

I suspect that the most likely scenario will be 2 accelerating 1, but it could play out in any of the above ways.

Bottom line is that anyone still supporting IPv4 only is basically running on a toxic-polluter business model depending on everyone else to cover the growing costs of the mess they are making of the current internet.

Owen