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Comment by timdorr | Hacker News Reader

> Forcing people to use anything is never a good way to promote innovation.

Of course it is. That's how innovation happens. They are focused on overcoming a constraint of the system they operate within. In this case, it will be to get around the limitations of the private IPv4 network, or to make the upcoming IPv6 network easier and more appealing to use.

Most innovations are to overcome some sort of limitation, whether that is with a man-made system or just the laws of nature as we currently understand them. Unbounded innovation hardly ever occurs and usually results in some shitty mobile game.

Now that's not to say MIT IS&T isn't behaving extraordinarily shitty here. But this won't stifle innovation, just refocus it. Whether that's towards a more worthy goal is certainly up for debate.

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Innovation will happen, but it is heavily misdirected.

What if I'm a biology expert and want to run a server to demo something cool? I should be spending my time doing innovation in biology.

What if I'm a deep learning enthusiast and came up with something cool to demo? I should be spending my time hacking at that.

What if I'm a physics student and want to start a blog?

The majority of MIT students are awesome innovators, but most are not innovators in TCP/IP. Forcing a bunch of people who are not networking specialists and sysadmins to deal with the lack of IPv6 support in the rest of the world is not going to promote innovation where it needs to be.

Running a server isn't demoing something cool in biology, coming up with something cool to demo in deep learning, or starting a blog. If these people are going to spend their time doing innovation in biology, hacking on deep learning, or writing about physics, they shouldn't be spending their time running a server or configuring IP.

Why not? It's 2017, and it's super-easy to spin up a server and code something cool to demo something you did in any of these fields. Or spin up an MVP of a random product idea you have. Never tell anyone that "they should not be doing something" when they want to. That too stifles innovation. The idea is to create a low-friction path for people to do what they actually want to do.

NAT is technological friction. Telling people that "they should not do something" is also friction.

What about even just learning to write apps in your own time? I built dozens of demo websites while I was a student there. A few were slashdotted. Having IPv4 addresses and access to bandwidth from my bedroom was a massive blessing.

The problem isn't configuring IPv6. The problem is without IPv4 you cannot easily make a server that is guaranteed accessible from anywhere in the world, by anybody. That's not a problem that most MIT students are in a position to solve or innovate in a short time. At least not without spending money for an AWS instance that frankly most undergrads don't have the money for.

Innovating in making an HTML5 app to demo your cool bioinformatics project on the other hand is a weekend hackathon deal.

And servers are basically free at MIT. You can just pick up and assemble them up off of reuse when labs throw away various parts. Plug them into your gigabit ethernet socket in your bedroom, get an IPv4 address, and you're up and running in less than an hour.

Why not?

You're the one who said people should be spending their time doing innovation in biology, hacking on deep learning, and starting a blog, rather than learning how to configure and deal with networking.

If anyone wants to do those things, they can do them now and not have to worry about installing and configuring servers and dealing with IP networking. Or they can work on innovating in networking.

The fact is, however, that no one is going to say "if my server wasn't IPv6 only, then people would read my blog". They'll most likely be saying that because there's a lot of other content to consume on the Internet, and attention is limited. And if that is the case, they can get a $5 a month digital ocean instance, or one from any number of other providers, accessible over IPv4 and IPv6, and serve both protocols to entire Internet.

Also, chances are, the audience for a physics student's blog is most likely at some university, which has a good chance of having a working IPv6 stack; especially now that MIT is going wholehog on IPv6.

It still makes no sense that forcing researchers and students at MIT to access the Internet through a NAT has anything to do with innovation in IPv6, though, unless you count all the innovative ways students are going to come up with getting around the IPv4 NAT... which is a pretty pointless exercise.

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