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I've said this since time immemorial, and networking people often dismiss it. "Just use DNS," say people who have never actually worked netops or devops.

The length of the addresses and the clunky nature of their ASCII representation is absolutely the #1 reason the IPv6 has taken this long. User experience is the most powerful force affecting large scale adoption, and IPv6 has poor UX.

I think the UX is partly fixable by creating less horrible ASCII representation, but this would take a lot of coordination that was hard even back then and is virtually impossible now. If someone told me in 500 years we're still running dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 absolutely unchanged, I'd believe it.

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Half the reason (literally) the address looks so bad is not because of IPv6 but because everyone keeps choosing to implement randomized in-subnet addresses and cycle through them for privacy reasons.

E.g. 2600:15a3:7020:4c51::52/64 is not too horrible but 2600:15a3:7020:4c51:3268:b4c4:dd7b:789/64 is a monster by unrelated intent of the client.

This is pretty much on the money. IPv6 addressing can be pretty simple if you design your subnets and use low numbers for hosts. But hosts themselves will forgo that and randomly generate 64 bit random host addresses for themselves - some times for every new connection. Now you have thousands of IPv6 addresses for a single computer speaking out to the Internet.

"Modern" tooling in the consumer space is pretty dire for IPv6 support too. The best you can reasonably get is an IPv6 on the WAN side and then just IPv4 for everything local. At least from the popular routers I've experienced lately.

I’ve been amazed for years at the fact that many of the best routers turn V6 off by default.

Of course I know why. If you turn it on it slightly increases edge case issues as complexity always does. Most people don’t actively need it so nobody notices.

Yes, I forgot about SLAAC and worthless privacy extensions.

Privacy extensions are worthless because there are just sooooo many ways to fingerprint and track you. If you are not at least using a VPN and a jailed privacy mode browser at a bare minimum, you are toast. If you’re serious about privacy you have to use stuff like Tor.

V6 privacy extensions are like the GDPR cookie nonsense: ineffective countermeasures with annoying side effects.

SLAAC sucks too. They should have left assignment up to admins or higher level protocols like with V4. It’s better that way.

Privacy extensions are the reason your ISP can't make you pay money for the number of internet-connected devices at your house.

I think you just changed my mind. I hadn’t thought about that angle.

Respect for considering new information.

If ISPs tried that, everyone would just go back to using NAT, even for IPv6.

Most people are just using the ISP provided router as their gateway today anyways. E.g. ATT fiber is proud to advertise to you that it knows about each of your devices on the ONT+Router combo - that's even the only way to set up a port forward (you can't just type in an IP, you have to pick a discovered device).

"But people can NAT the v4 with another router to hide it!" -> sure, and the same crappy solution works with v6.

"But at least prosumers can replace the ONT via cloning the identifiers and certain hardware" -> also no change with v6.

Randomized addresses do have valid use cases though, particularly when connecting to Wi-Fi networks other than your own when set to randomize the MAC per connection (not just the scanning MAC) as well, but I'm just not really convinced this is a realistic example as framed.

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