depends on how you look at it. Right now it's very much a tragedy of the commons.
IPv6 not being supported in many places means the internet is more centralised, less likely to use proper p2p tech- because it's a lot harder to make it work rather than throwing up a TURN box and relaying everything.
"The latency? Who cares? IPv6 sometimes breaks right now" - because nobody is testing it, so why should people be the first to support it? There's no easy upside.
The only real upside for businesses is not having to pay for increasingly expensive IPv4 allocations. But they don't really care, its not nearly expensive enough yet. Customers will get GCNAT, businesses will continue as normal.
All that will happen is that the internet gets slower and less equal.
Which is exactly the same thing that's happening with inefficient memory hungry software: people either have to buy a more expensive laptop or they have a shitty experience.. Nobody is advocating for them, they just feel things getting shittier year on year and many are just choosing to avoid technology instead.
>IPv6 not being supported in many places means the internet is more centralised, less likely to use proper p2p tech-
Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content. At best you'd see something like netflix trying to offload their video hosting costs onto their customers.
Well yeah, because they can't. Maybe if they could, they would do it more. You probably wouldn't want to host a permanent website from home, although some people do, but you could share a file. It would be popular with game servers, too.
>You probably wouldn't want to host a permanent website from home, although some people do, but you could share a file.
bittorent has been around for decades and nobody used it. They emailed files to themselves instead, or used dropbox. This all happened before the ipv4 shortage and people getting moved to CGNAT.
I think the commenter you’re replying to is pointing out that nobody used BitTorrent for legitimate cases. And that take is sadly correct. Despite having huge upsides, everyone just hosts on centralized CDNs, file syncing services (gdrive, Dropbox, etc).
Even Linux distros push you so direct downloads now rather than pointing to trackers.
BitTorrent only has healthy usage for content that’s untenable to host legitimately.
You sure you don't have this reversed? The average person uses the internet to watch tiktok videos and join zoom meetings, all of which is centralized. The people self hosting their NAS or minecraft server is a tiny minority.
IPv6 doesn't solve the Airdrop problem. It'll only work at reasonably-fast speeds in the rare case that both people are connected to the same wifi network - but there's already tools like LocalSend[0] for that. Having a file go via cellular provider A, halfway across the country, through some IX, halfway across the country back, and via cellular provider B tends to make things a bit slow.
Similarly, using P2P for game VOIP is a Really Bad Idea as it basically doxxes the player. Even 1v1 lobbies aren't always with people you trust enough to invite them into your house, so you shouldn't be handing them your IP address! In 99% of cases it is better to proxy it via a server instead.
Brother, if I can do something to you based on your IP address you are already totally fucked.
This whole "the thing that I use to be addressed on the internet is dangerous" myth needs to die. It's a telephone number, not a home address. You can block numbers.
> Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content.
P2P is not “self hosting”.
It’s video/audio conferencing working with less latency. It’s the ability to send a file directly and not via some file sharing site. It’s multiplayer gaming simplified. It’s faster software updates via BitTorrent.
Obviously I can't see the future, and I live in my own bubble....
Isn't self hosting, and small, private/semi-private communities the only way forwards for much of the internet? AI has made content extremely valuable, which in turn has started to destroy the openness of the web. Things are getting more and more siloed, with entry fees.
There's a world where self hosting comes back in a big way. AI ironically makes it much easier.
Someone DDoSing the $10 VPS hosting my personal website is no big deal. I don't care about it strongly enough that it must stay online, so they'll eventually get bored and move on.
Someone DDoSing my home internet connection? That's going to be a serious inconvenience - especially with WFH. No internet for a week isn't an option.
> Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content.
How about Xbox/PS multiplayer/P2P gaming? Hosting a Minecraft server?
When Skype first came out it was P2P, but had to come up with the "supernode" concept (basically STUN/TURN/ICE) because of NAT: now all of our communication methods basically have to phone into the mothership.
Do we want the Internet to be more centralized (possibly given more power to the tech bros) or more decentralized?
Would you give your personal phone number to random strangers on the internet, or even publish it on a website? Probably not, due to the possibility of harassment, right? IP addresses aren't any different, which immediately kills a huge portion of the game server self-hosting.
A hosted and managed Minecraft server is available for less than the cost of a cup of coffee per month. At that price point it makes very little sense to deal with the hassle of having to run your own home server. Even if you want to geek out and manage it yourself, a VPS is a very attractive option.
And for the handful of people that remain and really want to homelab a Minecraft server for their friends but are stuck behind CGNAT, there's always software like Hamach - which solved the gaming NAT problem back in 2004.
So no, self hosting isn't a problem which needs IPv6 to solve it.
> Would you give your personal phone number to random strangers on the internet, or even publish it on a website? Probably not, due to the possibility of harassment, right? IP addresses aren't any different
1. The claim that IP addresses aren’t different from the phone numbers requires proof
2. Until very recently, just before the Covid pandemic people regularly exchanged physical business cards with their mobile phone numbers. So, yes, people do that.
> Would you give your personal phone number to random strangers on the internet, or even publish it on a website? Probably not, due to the possibility of harassment, right? IP addresses aren't any different, which immediately kills a huge portion of the game server self-hosting.
You talk of a singular number in this analogy, but that is completely non-sensical in the IPv6 context: even brain dead ISPs assign /64s to residential connections, so you could give random strangers a random IPv6 address that's valid for a few hours and then you remove it from service.
Want to provide a service? Generate a new address, assign it to the server, publish it to whomever you wish. When you're done remove the ip addr alias. Give each rando their own IPv6 address for the service that's only live for a finite amount of time.
In fact you could generate a new IPv6 address each second in your assigned /64 and you wouldn't run out for 584,942,417,355 years.
The p2p tech argument doesn’t work anymore. Most routers ship a stateful IPv6 firewall enabled by default now because IPv6 was resulting in people’s vulnerable shit getting popped.
So p2p stuff still doesn’t work without explicit configuration that rules out 99% of your users. It’s super annoying.
It even mostly works fine on IPv4 NAT, but there are a bunch of edge cases (often involving CGNAT) where it breaks down so you can't rely on it, which are solved by IPv6.
Hole punching works fine for IPv4 as well outside of endpoint dependent NAT, which most ISPs don’t use because it visibly shows up to normies as a bad connection in PlayStations/Xboxes.
Once you have to hole punch, you’ve lost the thread of why people bother switching to IPv6.
Yeah, it's impossible to do anything about a stateful firewall to get p2p connections.
It's a shame because if we could only get over stateful firewalling we'd be one step closer to the impossible task of using voice chat in console video games.
Right now they don't have that of course and the only hurdle is "NAT Types" which, as we all know, is a much easier problem to solve for the average person...
The reason to regulate in maybe 2000 or so was that staying with IPv4 led to NAT. NAT led to it being impossible for users to receive incoming connections. Inability to receive incoming connections led to (a) horrendous protocol complexity, (b) probably some applications never even being invented, and, (c) everybody using ultra-centralized services. Ultra-centralized services led to advertising-driven distortions of service utility, concentration of political and economic power, and choke points. Choke points led to surveillance state bullshit that's just fully ripening today.
And, yes, this was (in broad outline) foreseeable in 2000. I wasn't the only one.
> Of all the things to regulate why bother with this one? It's not like IPv6 is better for the environment or useful to the consumer.
If I'm with a small-time ISP that has to use CG-NAT because they don't have the cash to buy/lease enough IPv4 addresses to give one to each CPE WAN interface, then using things like Xbox/PS multiplayer/P2P gaming is no longer possible. Want to host a Minecraft server? Too bad.
1. I'd say "no", but if it involves opening a port, I could see the ISP argument even if I disagree with it.
2. I agree. The Internet was supposed to offer end-to-end connectivity. That went out the door with NAT...
Most isps, you can’t do that anymore as you no longer have a publically reachable IPv4 address. It moved the ‘just configure your router’ part to their equipment, as they now use CGNAT.
CGNAT doesn't have to draw a random ip:port combo out of a hat for every new connection. Nothing is stopping an ISP from implementing it by taking one ip and assigning ports 1-10.000 to customer A, 10.001 - 20.000 to customer B, and so on. Similarly, nothing is stopping an ISP from adding long-lived mappings to an otherwise-random pool which outlive the initial connection.
Some ISPs offer CGNAT traversal by letting you request a fixed ip:port combo via their self-service website. It's pretty much the same as regular NAT traversal, except that you can't freely pick the outside port. And because the number of people who actually care about it is so small: some ISPs even let you request to be exempted from CGNAT altogether! They'll already have a pool of legacy non-CGNAT customers and a pool of new CGNATted ones, so assigning a handful of nerds to the legacy pool to prevent them from complaining isn't a big deal.
> Nothing is stopping an ISP from implementing it by taking one ip and assigning ports 1-10.000 to customer A, 10.001 - 20.000 to customer B, and so on. Similarly, nothing is stopping an ISP from adding long-lived mappings to an otherwise-random pool which outlive the initial connection.
I’m pretty sure that the scarcity of Legacy IP addresses and port numbers (!) is exactly what stops providers from doing that, at least by default. I’ve seen NAT running out of ports way too many times, and shortening of connection tracking lifetime comes with a whole set of hard to spot bugs.
Can we at least stop claiming that IPv6 is "more complicated" than IPv4 when we're making it a requirement for IPv4 ISPs is to create CGNAT management portals.
It reduces the monopolization power of big cloud providers. This is especially relevant to countries that aren't the US, because it reduces reliance on the US.
It also just reduces resource waste (of labor time). Countries like China that have insufficient IPv4 addresses and political power have mandated it. One IP per home is manageable, for now, but CGNAT is really bad.
We are locked into apple and google backup services because of CGNAT. If ipv6, and symmetric fiber internet, was ubiquitous when smartphones came out, there could have been a competing option that backs up your own data to an appliance in your own home.
