Re: Stuffed Turkey
It's chicken-and-egg in both directions.
1. All content is currently available on IPv4, and will be for the foreseeable future. This is because (a) there is no squeeze on IPv4 availability at the content provider side, and (b) eyeballs are money, and content providers are not going to exclude access from the significant proportion of users who have only IPv4, by creating IPv6-only content. (Bar a few cat-feeders, and loopsofzen.co.uk).
2. However, most of that content is *not* available on IPv6. Large content providers like the BBC (who used to be technical leaders, back in the 20th century) simply can't be arsed to turn on IPv6, even though it would be relatively easy. Ditto for smaller content providers like, erm, The Register. Presumably they are worried about their user tracking and advertising and monetising - they don't want to risk anything which might break - or they simply have higher business priorities.
Therefore: all ISPs must provide IPv4 access to reach all Internet content (or else users will say "your service is broken"); and all content providers must provide content over IPv4, to make it available to all end-users.
Once in this situation, IPv6 becomes irrelevant. Adding it doesn't make any significant content available to users, although it reduces the NAT load on their routers; and adding it on the content provider side doesn't add any new eyeballs, although it may improve performance for some.
Possible ways out:
- government regulation. They legislate for web content to be accessible to disabled people; why not also that content has to be accessible via IPv6?
- something massive happens. There was talk, for example, of the Chinese turning off IPv4. If they do that, and if the Great Firewall of China doesn't do NAT64, then content providers will lose 1/5th of their global audience if they don't make it reachable via IPv6.
- someone builds a bloody great NAT64 gateway from the new Internet to the old, so you can build IPv6-only client networks and still reach all content. Cloudflare or Google would be well placed to do this. Getting hold of the IPv4 resources for the NAT pools is getting harder and harder though.