Re: IPv4 flag day

[Saku Ytti via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

On Sat, 20 Jun 2026 at 22:37, John Levine via NANOG
<nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:

> Those all had significant security benefits.  IPv6, not so much.

I think it's easy to argue IPv4+IPv6 expose more surface area for
attackers. But I don't actually think infosec matters at all, not the
way we approach it, so I wouldn't use it, unless in bad faith when
that's the best way to market it. There are superior arguments to
restore a single stack.

I believe we can objectively state that the market always expected us
to solve this, the market always expected IP addresses not to have
economic value. If the market had anticipated that IP addresses are
worth hundreds of billions of dollars, we would have run out of them
during the IT bubble.  But remarkably little, irrelevant, amount of
hoarding happened even at the very end, at the very end some started a
bunch of fake companies to get a single block per company, but it
wasn't meaningful amount by any means.

We have underperformed market expectations and created a market where
none was designed to be. If we want to retcon that as a desirable
outcome, we have a lot of work to do, I can come up with many
improvements in our protocols to facilitate market creation for
various protocol level resources where no such limits exist today.

-- 
  ++ytti
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