Comment by AtlasBarfed

We've seen only the world where everything has been adopted to IPv4. p2p technologies strive even under it, but they could really shine with the ability to connect directly between devices. Imagine BitTorrent on steroids, where you don't have peers with assigned IPv4 and seedboxes and everybody else. Torrents are generally faster than usual channels to download things, but with ipv6 it would be far faster than now.

Cloudless cameras streaming to your phone without Chinese vendor clouds, e2e encrypted emails running on your phone without snooping by marketing people and three-leter agencies, content distribution network without vendor lock-ins. The possibilities are impressive if we have a way to do it without TURN servers that cost money and create a technical and legal bottlenecks.

We can't say nobody wants that world because we've never tried it in the first place. I definitely would like to see that.

Don't you think everyone should have the option to be a full participant? Being locked behind cloud providers and multiple layers of NAT with IPv4 means that can never happen, even if consumers want it to.

I was lucky enough to experience the 90's internet where static IP addresses were common. I had a /24 (legacy "class C" block) routed to my home, and still do.

> Exactly. IPv6 was developed in the ivory towers where it was still assumed that everyone wanted to be a full participant of the internet.

IPv6 was developed in the open on mailing lists that anyone could subscribe to:

    The criteria presented here were culled from several sources,
    including "IP Version 7" [1], "IESG Deliberations on Routing and
    Addressing" [2], "Towards the Future Internet Architecture" [3], the
    IPng Requirements BOF held at the Washington D.C. IETF Meeting in
    December of 1992, the IPng Working Group meeting at the Seattle IETF
    meeting in March 1994, the discussions held on the Big-Internet
    mailing list (big-internet-at-munnari.oz.au, send requests to join to
    big-internet-request-at-munnari.oz.au), discussions with the IPng Area
    Directors and Directorate, and the mailing lists devoted to the
    individual IPng efforts.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726

Just like all current IETF discussions are in the open and free for all to participate. If you don't like the direction things are going in participate: as Gandhi did (not) say, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

One of the co-authors on that RFC worked at BBN: you know, the folks that actually built the first the routers (IMPs) that created the ARPA/Internet in the first place. I would hazard to guess they have know something about network operations.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta...

> But the social/political environment was that everyone just wants to be a passive consumer, paying monthly fees to centralized hosts to spoon-feed them content through an algorithm.

Disagree, especially with the hoops that users and developers have to jump through to deal with (CG-)NAT:

> [Residential customers] don't care about engineering, but they sure do create support tickets about broken P2P applications, such as Xbox/PS gaming applications, broken VoIP in gaming lobbies, failure of SIP client to punch through etc. All these problems don't exist on native routed (and static) IPv6.

* https://blog.ipspace.net/2025/03/response-end-to-end-connect...

Well, with such a description of the 'vices' of IPv6 vs the 'virtues' of IPv4 count me as one who considers himself in full support of the ivory towered greybeards who decided the 'net was meant to be more than a C&C network for sheeple. Once I got a /56 delegated by my IAP - which coincided with me digging down the last 60 metres of fibre conduit after which our farm finally got a real network connection instead of the wires-on-poles best-effort ADSL connection we had before that - I implemented IPv6 in nearly all - but not all - services. Not all of them, no, because IPv6 can make life harder than it needs to be. Internally some services still run IPv4 only and will probably remain doing so but everything which is meant to be reachable from outside can be reached through both IPv4 as well as IPv6. I recently started adding SIP services which might be the first instance of something which I'll end up going IPv6-only due to the problems caused by NATting the SIP control channels as well as the RTP media channels, something reminiscent of how FTP could make life difficult for those on the other side of firewalls and NAT routers. With IPv6 I do not need NAT so as long as the SIP clients support it I should be OK. Now that last bit, client support... yes, that might be a problem sometimes.