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Treat IPv6 as an extension of IPv4, not a separate network space.

Deprecate software that doesn't support IPv6.

Stop DHCP servers from providing IPv4 by default.

Then we can enjoy a world with mass 6 adoption, almost no hosts bound to 4 addresses, and billions of available 4 addresses.

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> Treat IPv6 as an extension of IPv4, not a separate network space.

We could have rolled out 6to4 with no anycast gateways, and the entire internet numbered from 2002:<ipv4>::/48. Every node could have IPv6, using only software updates and no cooperation from ISPs or RIRs.

That approach would have had some interesting positives and negatives, but the time to discuss it was >20 years ago.

Except every node still needs an IPv4 address for that to work since it doesn't play nice with NAT. It also doesn't solve the issue of not being able to talk to IPv4-only hosts, since the issue is not the backbone or ISP anymore, but people building their stuff only with IPv4 in mind and don't care enough to add support for anything else.

It would have gained us very little and we would be in an even worse situation now (in some countries we are at > 50% IPv6 in the real world now!)

What an exceptionally wasteful idea.

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