Comment by Sophira
5 months ago
> This seems like a truly unreasonable level of political skill for nearly any setting. We're talking about changing every endpoint in the Internet, including those which can no longer be upgraded. I struggle to think of any entity or set of entities which could plausibly do that.
Case in point: IPv6 adoption. There's no interoperability or negotiation between it and IPv4 (at least, not in any way that matters), which has led to the mess we're in today.
Many servers and clients support both ipv4 and ipv6. So, in a sense, there's a "negotiation" happening between client and server.
That’s not negotiating- I can’t connect to a server over v4 and have it tell me to switch to v6 or vice versa. That’s just supporting 2 completely different protocols.
Right. The closest thing we have to IPv6 "negotiation" is the Happy Eyeballs algorithm[0], which is literally just "connect to both at the same time and pick the one that connects first". The name serves to legitimise it and make it sound fancy but it's basically just brute force + a bit of caching.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs