In a recent lenghty post Geoff Huston, chief scientist of the Asian-Pacific Network Information Center, discussed the status of the IPv6 protocol migration and made some considerations of the future of that migration. An interesting reading that motivated this brief post.
"[...] the transition to IPv6 is progressing very slowly not because this industry is chronically short-sighted," the APNIC scientist argued. "There is something else going on here. IPv6 alone is not critical to a large set of end-user service delivery environments." Indeed, he believes that we are already "pushing everything out of the network and over to applications."
Of course, he talked about CDNs, the cloud and the business environment that transformed the Internet from a network-of-peers to a broadcasting network in the last twenty years or more. I have already considered the shattered Internet as a modern deprivation of the original spirit of the Big Network. The almost current irrelevance of the IPv6 migration for many involved parties is a sign of time and again proof of such a kind of drift for me. We are still around 40% of the net with a fully operational dual-stack, with the prospective to live in dual-stack IPs until 2045 or more.
I recently changed ISP at home, abandoning Vodafone and moving to a human-size national provider. The new contract came with a dual-stack connection that includes a (free-as-beer) /48 IPv6 static class allocation, as recommended by RIPE, which was not even considered by Vodafone and other prime-time big telco companies here. Even my VPS provider gives free-as-beer IPv6 addresses, which can be attached to my VPS to provide different services.
Every damn connected device at home now has its own static IPv6 address, which can be controlled and filtered via my home router. I mean potentially 65535 different devices with their own static addresses. Filtering by source and destination IPv6 and ports in such conditions for security is elementary, as well as organizing multiple VPNs for any use. If you want to expose your home NAS or any other service out of your home network, even behind a CGNAT connection (as provided by many ISPs out there with no other chance), using IPv6 is a practical and immediate solution under your complete control. Here in Italy, if you have a business contract, you can sometimes pay for a static IPv4; otherwise, you are NATed with a minimal chance of creating easily internal services among multiple sites.
A nice plus is the drastic reduction of port scanning by bots, which is a sad, shared experience for anyone who exposes any service to the IPv4 limited space of addresses: scanning billions of addresses is not for the script kiddies.
For me, IPv6 has the same exact role as the indie web movement for users' independence on the modern Internet. If you are able to act, this needs to be done now, not in the next twenty or thirty years, before all the users would be considered always only customers or passive subjects.