Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

This really needs to be an EU-wide thing, and a lot sooner.

Two years till it becomes illegal to offer something on IPv4 for the general public and not offer it on IPv6, two more years and no ISP may route IPv4.

Also no ISP NAT bullshit. A default enabled firewall refusing incoming connections is fine, but the internet should be a network of machines that can talk to each other, and for that to happen it must be possible for owners to accept incoming connections, even if it is for nothing more than remote access to their PCs.

View on HN

I agree completely, but bigger companies are going to lobby against that. They’ll even give reasonable sounding reasons, such as switching costs or user safety.

Their real reason though will probably be that the truly peer-to-peer networks enabled by a world free of NAT and symmetric bandwidth would undercut their precious market.

Finally, I’m not sure our governments would like the rise of Anarchist networks where speech is so free they can’t even control it. See all the attempts to criminalise or put limits to encryption. Such things would never happen under democracy, but the representative governments we live under are a little different. (Historically, representative government was conceived in explicit opposition to democracy, and democracy lost.)

> Two years till it becomes illegal to offer something on IPv4 for the general public and not offer it on IPv6

Why? Is there any pressing need for ipv6 only connectivity that you'd make ipv4 only illegal?

Because this of course:

> the internet should be a network of machines that can talk to each other, and for that to happen it must be possible for owners to accept incoming connections

The importance of this is quite obvious if you’re politicised enough. Stuff like Free Speech.

From the perspective of the US that makes sense. It's legal to say practically everything but hostings will kick you out if they don't like you.

But in the EU speech is restricted and hostings won't kick you out unless you say something illegal... and at that point you'll be in trouble hosting stuff using your home connection.

Its not just that - if we want to be competitive then it should be possible for a hacker to offer a new type of idea and let the world try it out - perhaps a decentralized web, or planet scale IPFS, or something that yet only exists in the head of some 17 year old nerd.

And while Europe is more restricted than the US, it is not like we are the Soviet union.

It's mostly African and Asian countries with (very) low adoptions, and this translates to "screw all the countries too poor to adopt IPv6, and let's reduce their chances in the global economy even more". I'm putting it rather sharp here and I have no doubt that's not what your intent is, but that's absolutely an effect of forbidding IPv4.

There is an actual market for buying IPv4s, meanwhile you can get millions of IPv6 addresses for free. This means that connecting the next billion will be much cheaper if they don't have to compete with companies with far more money.

So no, it does not mean screwing over the poor.

This is irrelevant. The infrastructure does not exist. Creating this infrastructure within two years would be a huge task (and who will pay for it?)

In the Netherlands all government services must comply to the rules of internet.nl, which, among others, requires IPv6 connectivity.

But for some things you are dependent on others, for instance, the colo not having IPv6. (and in th case of Internet.nl: IPv6 for email is still opt-in on request with Office 365, DANE is not supported yet, etc)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com