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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Stack overflow's reply to "why do you not support ipv4" is more or less what you describe:

> It's just a lot of work for honestly not a lot of gain just yet. Things like HTTPS and HTTP/2 are far more impactful for users. We'll get to IPv6 eventually, but it's unlikely to happen any time soon. There are simply far more impactful things we can do with our time on the sysadmin front for the foreseeable future.

> This is something everyone on our SRE team would like to do. We just don't have the time yet, even more important things are in queue.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/348224

Other services sit on giant heaps of ipv4 space and see it appreciate. For them, price increases are wonderful, because it means they can charge higher rents for the ipv4 space.

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Stackoverflow's quote you pasted makes me feel like an old fart on the Internet. I imagine there are a lot of rose-tinted glasses at play here, but I kind of remember an Internet when we would do things for the good of the network as well as for the good of the user.

Taking action as a group to speed adoption of a technology that makes the kind of innovation and autonomy we had in the first thirty years of the Internet accessible to the next thirty years of the Internet is impactful for users. The gigantic companies who have bought /8s and /9s of IPv4 space are not going to undermine their investments. It will take companies and network operators who are big enough to decide but small enough to still be idealistic who say "yes, IPv6 is worth it and we are going to spend the time and people and money and resources on doing it."

This is the same problem we have with housing; it can't be an investment and a thing everyone needs. At least the difference here is probably no one winds up hungry under a bridge taking ill-advised substances to handle daily life simply because they don't have a /24 to call their own.

Yeah, this development had advantages as well as disadvantages. I feel that websites of today have become easier to use for average non technical people for example than they were back in the day. This is what the greater user focus motivated by commercial interests brings you. On the other hand you see technical improvements being neglected like in this instance.

On the bright side, IPv6 adoption is increasing constantly, and if you fit the curves we'll have 100% adoption (or close) in the 2030s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28186709

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