IPv6 woes - RFC

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Wed Sep 8 18:33:41 UTC 2021



> On Sep 7, 2021, at 23:50 , Saku Ytti <saku at ytti.fi> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 7 Sept 2021 at 19:51, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hopefully this idea that “you need to do IPv4 anyhow” will die some day soon.
> 
> Fully agreed, I just don't see the driver. But I can imagine a

$$$$$$

IPv4 continues to increase in cost. Surely, there is a point where organizations
start to cry uncle.

Surely there is a point where we move from but you have to do IPv4 anyhow
to but you have to do IPv6 to support most new things because newcomers
don’t want to pay $150/address to get on the legacy network.

(Yeah, I know it’s only $50 today, but it was $10 a few years ago and $30
last year).

> different timeline where in 2000 several tier1 signed mutual binding
> contracts to drop IPv4 at the edge in 2020. And no one opposed,

That would have been nice, but that opportunity was missed. I’m thinking that
the most hope for this to happen realistically is for eyeball providers to start
charging extra to provide IPv4AAS to their customers that need it. I think
an announcement from one or two of the major ones would serve as an
extreme motivation for the lagging content providers (Are you listening here
Amazon? Skype? Google Cloud? AWS? (global load balancing)) to get their
shit together. Once they do, there’s really not much “you have to support
IPv4 anyway” left, then the eyeballs can shut it off for customers that don’t
pay extra and voila… Little incentive remains to continue maintaining
IPv4 infrastructure.

> because 20 years before was 1980, and 20 years in the future IPv4
> wont' anymore be a thing, it's clear due to exponential growth.
> 
> And we'd all be enjoying a much simplified stack and lower costs all
> around (vendor, us, customers).

Yep.

> Why is this not possible now? Why would we not sign this mutual
> agreement for 2040? Otherwise we'll be having this same discussion in
> 2040.

Because markets (and people) are bad at transition and we live in a world of markets
and perverse incentives. It’s part of the reason climate change is so hard to address
also.

Owen



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