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Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

Gonna re-post my 2023 comment on IPv6:

>It is gradually becoming acceptable to dismiss IPv6 and suggest searching for a modern, practically minded alternative. Important first step in untangling the mess.

>Naturally opinions vary as to what exactly would constitute modern. Common complaint is the significant mixing of OSI layers, in particular application level concerns like significant baggage of encryption & authentication. And then there's my pet peeve of BSD Sockets API incompatibility which was introduced accidentally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37119627

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I think that's an incredibly silly take. Any new protocol would first have to be implemented by all the routing dbd switching vendors. It would probably have a 3rd mutually incompatible addressing scheme, because yes IPv4s limited addresses space is still a problem there are countries that depend on v6s expanded address space to have sufficient connectivity (Particularly in APNIC).

Switching out the fundamental addressing protocol of the Internet is hard. You have to herd the cats of the hundreds of thousands of operators, device, operating system, and application vendors, and as long as the old protocol still works, no one has a strong incentive to switch. But they have a big distinctive of missing out on customers, or having to figure out the new protocol.

Any IPvNG is going to run face first into the same incentive problems that v6 has.

Yeah. It's particularly silly because OP is suggesting to replace something that everyone except for network administrators and network hardware vendors can treat as "IP with large addresses" [0] with a "modern, practically minded alternative".

Like, does OP propose that we switch away from IP to something that behaves significantly differently? Good fucking luck getting all the little bugs and behavioral assumptions baked in to just about everything squared away over the next fifty years.

[0] And -for the most part- network admins can treat it like that, too.

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