Use IPv6 Already

Inspired by damii's The World of IPv6

# The problem with IPv4

IPv4 was introduced by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) back in 1981. It only has room for roughly 4 billion addresses. Understandably, the folks at DARPA thought that would be plenty of addresses, especially since it was designed by a specialized military agency. They probably had no idea that in 45 years there would be over 15 billion devices (probably more), each wanting an internet connection.

# The crutch

IPv6 was introduced in 1995. It has room for about 340 UNDECILLION addresses (that number has 38 digits), which I'm pretty sure we won't expend any time soon.

However, IPv6 was not backwards compatible with IPv4, and would require new hardware and sofware updates to support it. Instead of making the switch, many internet providers started extending IPv4, like butter scraped over too much bread.

One such crutch to extend the address space of IPv4 was the NAT (Network Address Translation) architecture. The original RFC in which NAT is defined described it as a "short-term solution" to the problems of IPv4, intended to be replaced by a new solution (IPv6) as soon as possible... That was in 1994. These days NAT manifests itself as routers, where your router has an IPv4 address on the internet, and each of your devices has an IPv4 address on the router.

NAT can be seen as a security measure, because it isolates your devices from the internet at large. When enabling IPv6 you must be sure that each of your devices has an active firewall.

# The other crutch

However, even with NAT there were still not enough addresses to go around. Thus CG-NAT was born, which allowed internet providers to share IPv4 addresses between many customers.

It was already difficult enough to host a public server with NAT introducing the need to setup "port forwarding", so that your router (which is exposed to the internet) can forward requests to an internal device (which is only on the local network). But now you also had to call up your ISP to request that they reserve a static address for your router.

And thus, the free, open, decentralized internet, died.

# What can you do to bring back the internet's open age?

For people hosting websites and services, support IPv6. Supporting IPv6 has now become incredibly easy, with most tools supporting it out of the box. It is often just a matter of adding an AAAA record to your domain(s).

For individuals, make sure to enable IPv6 in your router. If your ISP doesn't support IPv6, question them and switch, and bring your friends along.

For developers, don't hard-code IPv4 into your programs. While this is not a major issue anymore, many older and smaller applications still assume that the device being used at least has an IPv4 address, which may no longer be the case.

NOTE: Enabling IPv6 on your router will give each device a publicly accessible IPv6 address. Be sure each device has a firewall enabled. Your router might also have a firewall, which you can configure.