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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Hot take: IPv4 might be techinically worse, but it's "politically" (in the classic sense of the word) better.

IPv6 essentially enables "universal internet IDs" for every device, which could streamline a lot of things, but enable a lot of weird surveillance/power balance issues that the cruft of IPv4 is actually incidentally helping guard against.

Again, I'm old enough to remember when e.g. the ISPs were going to try to charge per device in each household.

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This hasn’t been the case in decades, every OS defaults to randomly generating the trailing 64 bits of your address and cycling through new addresses periodically. Your IPv6 address is only fixed to your device if you choose to configure it that way.

Since the network half (leading 64 bits) is as fixed as your IPv4 address was, and the host half is random and constantly changing, an IPv6 address is exactly as uniquely identifying as an IPv4 address used to be.

Afaik, at least Fedora has the privacy extensions disabled by default.

> Again, I'm old enough to remember when e.g. the ISPs were going to try to charge per device in each household.

I don't really see that coming again and if it does you can just do NAT66 just like you can do NAT4.

You and I can, yes.

But, network effects.

If ISPs would try charging per device with IPv6, NAT66 routers would just become an off the shelf product. You can just sell a black box to people that solves the issue.

But more generally, I think times have changed enough for per device billing not being a viable approach anymore.

What network effects? Like a sibling comment already pointed out, privacy addresses come standard on all consumer OSes.

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