Modern cars are surveillance devices on wheels with major privacy risks

To be frank, even dynamic addresses don't provide that much extra privacy by themselves; but static addresses DO provide individual agency.

Given individual agency, there's got to be hundreds of ways to secure your privacy. But without individual agency, your privacy will always be dependent on someone else.

By having static addresses and permitting home services, you shift power away from centralized tech giants and bypass privacy issues caused by eg. content scanning, centralized storage and dependency on third-party systems.

As just one example among many: right now it's very hard to provide IoT gear that "just works" without central services somewhere. If the equipment could just talk to each other directly; I do think that'd improve privacy by quite a bit! (among many other advantages)

The key phrase is "Yet Another". They already collect so much data about you that one more data point won't shift the needle. The only way to deal with this is to force decentralization, so that aggregators don't get to see your data in the first place. Or at least, you have a fighting chance to keep it from them.

> Nothing about IPv6 even tilts one way or the other on the centralization vs. decentralized axis.

IPv6 allows every single device on earth to have its own unique IP address. This makes it possible for them to talk to each other directly; you don't need a central server to relay between them. IPv4 used to be this way too in the '90s at least, but we've started running out of IPv4 addresses since then. The solutions to fix this (especially NAT) lead to a need for centralized servers to mitigate the downsides.

> In point of fact, your implementation maximizes centralization pretty much by default.

You're saying a government mandate to switch everyone to IPv6 on a short timescale leads to centralization? That seems like a contradiction with your previous sentence: "Nothing about IPv6 even tilts one way or the other on the centralization vs. decentralized axis."

Maybe you were thinking something else?

But new business models do open up: A lot of functionality now needs to have some sort of cloud backing to be able to guarantee some level of 'Just Works'.

Imagine regular muggles being able to install stuff at home, which Just Works, doesn't need a central cloud service, doesn't invade your privacy, and continues to work even when the original manufacturer shuts down.

Right now really only specialists who know what to ask for can do that, and not all ISPs even have the option.

That is not how oligopoly and antitrust work. If producers don't actually make products that have the features available, there is no actual market for those products, and market pressure is the only means by which the general public has in order to force responsiveness.

The general public can never force the issue. Government granted subsidies, and regulation make this a captive market, where the costs are too deep for new market entrants, and only the people currently sitting at the table of each company will have a say; the same as happened during the time of robber barons.

There is a reason over the past 30 years business has become so concentrated, and that cycle will continue until it cannot.

Its not that no one cares about privacy. Its that no can do anything about it, they've been stripped of their agency because law wasn't enforced in a timely fashion, and elected representatives violated their oaths by largely ceding authority to their political party, and failing to be responsive to their constituents and slow moving crises. In other words, failing to act as a whole (paralysis).

This shows a broader issue that unfortunately follows the same failure modes as what happened with the Roman Republic.

Here is a side-by-side lineup.

You have two caste groups, the haves and the have nots (patrician's and plebeians),the middle class largely is gone now. Growing economic inequality (through money-printing as opposed to expansion), land reform issues (farmers losing their farms and being unable to economically compete as a function of government regulation/subsidy), corruption (at all levels), the erosion of separation of powers (stacking courts, kingmaking via superpac), infighting among the house of representatives and senate (political parties that abstain or veto solely on party lines); create political paralysis, and for roughly the past 70 years there has been groups made up of government and private business funded indirectly by government, seeking empire (through debt/money-printing), where they do so largely through private armies. The latter most was written about by Perkins in his Economic Hitman series.

The dynamics and their comparisons are striking.

It improves insurance companies however. "hey, you were 6 km/h above the limit, then we're truly sorry but we won't pay".