Hacker News Reader

Comment by oakejp12 | Hacker News Reader

I may be somewhat confused, but how would a different IP address/system prevent centralized services? It seems to me that the same market problems, the strong vendor lock-ins explained in the post, will still persist in IPv6. There's no mention of how/why IPv6 solves those problems, just that they do...

View on HN

It doesn't prevent them, but with IPv6 everyone can take back control. With IPv4, you are unable to get a decent amount of public addresses to run your service (if you are not having tons of money already).

You are talking about lower layer protocols here that don't matter for decentralization. In fact, a decentralized transport protocol can be made that doesn't require your ISP to give you an internet routable IP address nor put you behind NAT.

Think e-mail, for example. It never required you to have an internet routable IP addresses to communicate with anyone. There were and are plenty of local networks where people run local SMTP servers that communicate with upstream SMTP servers over local network and only those have public IP addresses to communicate with SMTP servers over public internet.

> with IPv6 everyone can take back control

Any service provider can just decide not to route consumer-facing IPv6 addresses. It's not like we all had tons of our own free routable static IPv4 addresses two decades ago, you still had to get them allocated from a service provider and have them route to you, and be allowed to host services. They're "giving away" IPv6 routing and allocation right now, but there is absolutely nothing stopping them from ending that practice.

You only have the control they allow you to have.

Like, I would feel like "I have my own dedicated global address nobody can take from me" is a decentralizing factor... But at the end of the day I still need my ISP to get me to the Internet, so not really.

The difference is, you can take any ISP and continue your business. 1, 2, 3 or even move somewhere else.

We have DNS for just that purpose. You don't need provider independent IP addresses and shouldn't rely on them not changing.

So just use a domain name instead of an IP address, like everyone else.

So, how does a DNS entry to 10.0.2.2 help to be reachable?

Assuming it is not trolling. Every time you get new IP from the ISP, you update DNS record for that domain. And browsers can connect to it to the exposed 80/443 port.

I believe GP's point is that some providers don't provide a publicly routable ip address.

Ah, haven't experience such thing yet. But if such thing happens, indeed it becomes way more complicated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com