On Jun 16, 2026, at 8:26 AM, Laszlo H via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
It is unfortunate that it worked out this way, but if we're going to shut one of them off it should be IPv6 - the one that's adding no benefit for anybody - just cost, complexity and reduced reliability. The idea of intentionally hobbling IPv4 precisely because it works, in order to make IPv6 look more appealing, is a perverse and bad faith approach. Yet this is what people have been working on for the past 10 years to try to make IPv6 appear relevant. If there were a benefit to gain from IPv6 then most would have migrated to it already. At this point it's just a few zealots who are trying to figure out how to undermine IPv4 at scale, so IPv6 becomes the next best choice. The decisions to make things different from IPv4 are not helping either (RA/DHCP, multiple routers and the like). But the biggest turnoff is the group of people who reply to every networking thread with "IPv6 IPv6 IPv6" even when it's not relevant. There is even coercive language like "legacy internet" being thrown around. This has turned into dogmatic loaded framing rather than engineering.
History has shown time and time again that in order for any large project to be accomplished, it has to be under the guise of attacking or defending against an enemy. The enemy might be an intangible concept rather than people or animals, but there must always be warfare for those involved to feel justified in their investment of effort and resources. If something doesn’t have an enemy to attack or defend against, then the resources and effort will be invested instead toward a more immediate-seeming item that *does* have an enemy requiring combat, because otherwise the person making the investment would be open to accusations of inaction toward the other item’s enemies and/or action in conspiracy with said enemies. Forget turtles, it’s tribal warfare all the way down.