If it is good for a customer then the provider will care. The customer will switch ISPs to those that support IPv6. Then the IPv4-only providers will get less money.
Sure, if you ask an economist. But here in the real world, switching ISPs is hard (fees, lack of competition, replacing gear...) and the benefit of IPv6 isn't apparent yet to most people. By the time it becomes, it'll be too late and nobody will have it yet, so there won't be anywhere to switch anyways.
There's a reason we have consumer protection regulation and much of it came as a result of situations where evryone thought, as you do, that the market/competition would solve the problem, but of course it didn't. That only happens in ideal markets where switching providers is trivial, the consumer is equally informed about all of them and the providers (and perhaps customers too) have equal economic power.
Your starting point was that any ISP who doesn't implement your preferred technical standard should be fined. With a disregard for whether IPv6 makes sense for them or their customers. You might detect a little pushback here on the idea that your ideas are real world. Laissez faire is a very practical approach.
> By the time it becomes, it'll be too late and nobody will have it yet, so there won't be anywhere to switch anyways.
A crisis so terrible I can't even imagine it. Nobody outside some fairly obscure tech circles would even notice.
Imagine if they'd taken this approach rolling out IPv4 and weren't fast enough to change the legislation. The rollout of IPv6 would look really hard if IPv4 was a legislated requirement. The EU just isn't a competent technical standards body, and it has no business trying to be one because a couple of tech types like IPv6.
> That only happens in ideal markets where switching providers is trivial...
I switched providers to get IPv6 support. It was pretty trivial.
> Your starting point was that any ISP who doesn't implement your preferred technical standard should be fined.
"my preferred standard" == the only alternative to the current collapsing standard that has been agreed upon by industry leaders for some 20 years now.
> With a disregard for whether IPv6 makes sense for them or their customers.
IPv6 can't "not make sense", it can only "not be necessary yet".
> A crisis so terrible I can't even imagine it. Nobody outside some fairly obscure tech circles would even notice.
What, service costs going through the roof because the ISP now has to buy IPv4 addresses? Getting IP blocked from sites because the address you share with half the town got reported for spam? Not being able to access IPv6-only sites from smaller providers who can't afford to lease IPv4 addresses? And only then the ISPs start investing in it, which will take a few years to finish, all the while your service is shit? Pretty obscure, yeah.
> I switched providers to get IPv6 support. It was pretty trivial.
I've been trying to for several years and have not been able to for a multitude of reasons.
> If it was profitable, the ISP would do it and pocket the now unnecessary service costs.
This is another "if you ask an economist" situation. In the real world, people will happily spend more effort justifying not doing v6 and working around problems caused by being v4-only than would be needed to just do v6.
> 99.9% people don't want to run their own SMTP server. It's an ultra-niche use case ISP don't care about.
This misses the point. It only takes one person behind CGNAT to get the CGNAT source IPs on a spam list, at which point it affects everyone. Plus spam exists on the web too, it's not an SMTP-only thing.
> There aren't any.
Which is exactly why it's so important to be deploying v6: so there can be v6-only sites. Or rather, more than there are at the moment, because they do exist.
> Look, it's just an internet addressing protocol, not something that justifies legislation.
I've seen an argument that it's already covered by existing legislation: the refusal of large/old providers to support v6, which forces the use of v4 which small/new providers can't get enough of, is beginning to look rather a lot like an abuse of market position. That would make it an anti-trust issue, which definitely falls within the remit of government.
>This is another "if you ask an economist" situation. In the real world, people will happily spend more effort justifying not doing v6 and working around problems caused by being v4-only than would be needed to just do v6.
Yea, I don't like silly economism too, and I know half the jokes too. However, right now IPv4 addresses aren't so expensive. Sure, way more expensive than the 0 bucks they should cost, but not that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
Here's a very rough calculation: The cost of IPv4 will start to bite when getting the needed addresses costs more than a single engineer salary where one lives. If a one time address buy costs less, it's not something business would care much for, and anti-trust won't touch it.
I'm not smart enough to be able to forecast pricing, right now it's not there yet. Eventually the price will force every public network to IPv6, while many private networks will remain IPv4 forever.
There are some services and sites that run IPv6-only. Some are for testing, sure, like this one: https://www.nebezi.cz/ some are because they are cheaper to run/ easier to setup e.g. some FreeBSD mirrors.
> 99.9% people don't want to run their own SMTP server. It's an ultra-niche use case ISP don't care about.
99.9% of services you can get banned from aren't SMTP. There are many other services which you can be IP banned from.
> Look, it's just an internet addressing protocol, not something that justifies legislation.
"Just an internet addressing protocol" kinda puts the entire internet to shame doesn't it? It's important that people can communicate on the internet, with IPv4 we decrease reliability and increase cost (in the long run) for everyone except those who sucked up as many addresses as possible early on.
But if we are to follow your reasoning:
A common charging port is just a port, doesn't require legislation
A standard protocol for troubleshooting your car is just a protocol, doesn't require legislation
* which brings benefits to billions of people but you don't agree with, doesn't require legislation
That one thing you agree with that probably isn't important for a lot of people, requires legislation.
Let's raise the standard and discuss why IPv6 is necessary or not and what implications it has for consumers.
IPv6 decreases privacy because you're not sharing an IP with half of town, which is bad. Even if you're randomizing v6 on the local subnet you're still in the same /64 so it's still relatively easy to track you.
P2P protocols actually work properly with IPv6 since machines can commmunicate directly with each other.
IPv6 is more complex to understand the addressing scheme in.
IPv6 isn't IPv4, so there's a learning curve.
IPv6 encourages decentralization.
IPv4 enourages centralization, because you can't get addresses anymore you can't start up new ISP's and we could call that anti-competetive. It also encourages proprietary solutions like cloudflared, or just hosting your stuff on AWS rather than in a colocated datacenter, because you can't get access to IP addresses.
We can't stack unlimited people on top of IPv4 either, there are only so many port numbers available. And NAT is just such a major PITA to work with.
> It also encourages proprietary solutions like cloudflared, or just hosting your stuff on AWS rather than in a colocated datacenter, because you can't get access to IP addresses.
Obtaining an IPv4 address is not an issue I ever had with hosting. People are using Cloudflare, Akamai or ELB because they are sick of script-kiddies buying a DDoS for 10$ an hour and extorting businesses for 1000$ and/or because they have customers from other continents complaining about load times.
And where are you hosting those services? A "megacorp" or a really old provider which sucked up enough v4 when it was easy?
What if I have a great software stack in the pipe ready to be colocation deployed somewhere and I want to run my own network with multiple transit providers to be sure I don't go down with either of them.
When that possibility is dead, as mentioned in other parts of the thread we're getting awfully close to an anticompetetive market.
Why should existing on the internet be a privilege for the richest of the rich? (Those who can afford to buy IP's/ISP's to fulfill their needs).
But yes, Cloudflare is a great way to protect your site from skiddie "booting". with ELB I'm not sure about pricing, might just prefer it to die for the "booter" duration if it's a personal site, if business.. Well there's hopefully $$$ to foot the AWS bill.
Good luck switching providers to get IPv6 support. Unless you have true gigabit fiber, the only providers that don't have shit speeds without exorbitant expense (aka - Virgin Media) refuse to support IPv6.
>I switched providers to get IPv6 support. It was pretty trivial.
Your use case is not everyone's.
I was forced to change ISPs recently and didn't have a choice as to which one (which is another, unrelated, issue).
I did some research and the ISP in question does provide IPv6 support for some customers. However, the sales drones I spoke with claimed to not even know what IPv6 was, let alone whether or not it was available in my area.
I'd say that has more to do with the exorbitant fees they charge for static IPv4 addresses than anything else.
As such, it's not always "pretty trivial" to get IPv6 on your ISP link. I sure wish it was.
> The customer will switch ISPs to those that support IPv6.
That assumes it's possible to switch ISPs. Where I live, within the city bounds of the capital of my country, there's only two ISPs that can deliver broadband service and neither do IPv6 properly.
Only for spherical customers in a vacuum. IPv6 is one of those things you can't expect the average customer to care about, even though it's ultimately important for them.
