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If I remember correctly, one reason for the quick adaption of SSL certificates was the combination of Let's Encrypt and Google saying it would improve ranking. Why doesn't Google just do the same for IPv6? With all the benefits of IPv6, wouldn't Google benefit from such a move as well?

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Their cloud platform doesn't even fully support IPv6, so I doubt they would do this before at least getting their own public offerings on board.

I was about to say. Cause they can't figure out IPV6 either. Their K8 and VPC networking is still not IPv6 complaint last I checked. If you're bored you can get this [extention](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffn...) and see just how much of the internet is actually IPv6

GKE can use IPv6 now

Do you have a link for any docs on that? Last I looked it was a weird hack using LB that translated IPv6 to K8s' native IPV4

GCP supports enough IPv6 that you can host sites on it with an external IPv6 address. The user's internal network addresses might be IPv4, but that's (hopefully?) a detail not exposed to the public internet.

As evidence, my personal website https://john-millikin.com runs on a GCP e2-micro and is reachable from IPv6-only clients.

Azure does as well, it's only partially functional though, for example ICMP doesn't work.

> Azure does as well, it's only partially functional though, for example ICMP doesn't work.

Azure doesn't have a good ICMP implementation even on IPv4.

I guess Vint Cerf wasn't hired by Google to provide any kind of input about TCP/IP or future of it.

Lorenzo Colitti is Google's IPv6 czar but when supporting IPv6 costs (hundreds of) millions of dollars, "input" is not enough. There needs to be a business case which there really isn't so far.

the lack of ipv4 addresses is becoming a good reason to make the switch.

Vint was a trophy for the Google founders; they could, so they did. Zuckerberg no doubt got a similar thrill out of having purchased Carmack's employment.

Your comment belittles the hard work Vint puts in every day. He could easily retire but is still amazingly energetic and engaged. Downvoted.

I don't think GP comment belittles Vint. It belittles Google, for just hiring him for his name and not for his expertise. Vint is very vocal about IPv6 adaptation, yet it sounds like his opinion seems to be treated as if he was some kind of intern there. "Cool Vint, you do your stuff, publish your papers and we do our stuff".

Facebook got the only mainstream VR device as well.

Well, forcing people to use SSL was easy to sell as an advantage to end users. IPv6 is irrelevant for end users, so it's a much harder sell.

Plus, if the big guys don't adopt IPv6 first, than Google would only be hurting their search quality if they demote projects using IPv4 only.

I think the issue is that the problem space is unequal.

TLS solved a problem that affected everyone, that end users didn’t understand. The ranking incentive made sense.

IPv6 honestly doesn’t really solve a problem for anyone. The people who can’t deal with CGNAT or have other problems are a tiny minority, and they have solutions to those problems.

The other benefits of IPv6 create more headaches than they solve. Why would you roll the dice and take outages to eliminate IPv4?

> The people who can’t deal with CGNAT or have other problems are a tiny minority

If you ever made a call online your latency has been impacted because we can't reliably establish connections between end users and have to proxy the calls through the (hopefully close) DC. The services are also more expensive for you, because they have to account for that traffic.

This impacts you whether you are behind a NAT or not.

If you are behind CGNAT, you're going to get more captchas and likely get occasionally ratelimited, because someone is bound to misbehave, or the aggregate of that traffic from a small IP range will look like an attack at some point.

CGNAT is a menace to any low latency connection since now your route needs to jump through some NATed hops that may be under varying amounts of load depending on how large the translation tables are. Things get worse if connectivity has to be established by some middlebox as you have no idea how many hops it takes to go to the middlebox and you have no guarantee how loaded this box is. Using a public TURN server can be terrible for VoIP call latency.

Some online games try avoid p2p because it can expose the players to other gamer in the session, who can then try DoS their IP as a competitive advantage.

Places that require calls to be recorded securely will need non p2p still.

And privacy conscious users are screwed either approach (p2p/centralised) if they want to hide their IP.

Not being natted doesn't mean you have to talk to others directly - just that you can. And yeah, once you have people who want to cheat in some ways, you'll need the centralised oversight / validation for the service either way.

Uhh this is a very much western view who already benefits from disproportionate allocations of ipv4 addresses.

For developing countries where such equipment can be costly and unscalable it does matter.

IMHO we aren't seeing these developing countries as early adopters of mass IPv6 or having local-only services move to IPv6-only due to lack of IPv4 addresses.

Like, I fully understand that they would be feeling much more pressure to migrate, but I don't see that this pressure working; and if even they aren't pushed to IPv6 then why would the western world do so?

https://subnettingpractice.com/ip-address-allocation-by-coun...

The allocation of ipv4 addresses are not fair. These developing Countries deserve the right to host and develop their own tech industries.

Already India is mandating the use of ipv6 by the end of the year.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

China too

http://www.cac.gov.cn/2021-07/23/c_1628629122784001.htm

The rest of the world should enable ipv6 if they wish to easily capture this growing market.

Well, that's the way to solve this chicken-and-egg problem - the people who need IPv6 the most will switch to it, perhaps by a mandate from the top, and then it will make practical sense for others to switch as well to ensure interoperability.

The final thing that would actually make IPv6 happen would be for India and China to ban IPv4 internally. Then companies would move, and fast.

Do you have additional data on this? Carrier grade nat equipment or hardware that supports tunneling ipv4 over ipv6 seems like it would be a very small percentage of a consumer network buildout cost.

Cgnat is a nightmare that no one should be subjected to.

It somewhat benefits large incumbent cloud providers that the costs of IPv4 blocks are non-trivial, it acts as a moat.

I'm not accusing them of having this as their reasoning or objective, but it's only new entrants or those without big war chests who are hurt by IPv4 scarcity.

If I were Google or AWS I would actively discourage industrial IPv6 adoption as a strategy.

It's because there are still significant issues in the average user's stack. If I enable IPv6, my ISP puts me behind a single address still and requires NAT that my router won't do.

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