> Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end.

You are confusing hoarding demand for legitimate need. The Amazon's and Cloudflare's of the world were playing games to get large allocations, speculators were spinning up hundreds of legal entities to get allocations, tons of backroom deals to look the other way.

Pretty much every use case today for IPv6 is environments where CGN would have worked just as well.

We should probably have auctions for IPv4 space to encourage more efficient use. Not that we have some kind of authority to require this, but we've often suggested this in connection with our proposal to prepare to allocate 240/4.

While one can say that there's no way that IPv4 demand can ever be "satisfied" (which seems right to me), one can also imagine a different quantity demanded at $0.50/address than at $0.00/address, and also different levels of effort to make sure that almost all addresses that are allocated get put into use on the Internet. (I know $0.00/address isn't exactly the right way to describe what RIR allocations cost, but economically they've been more similar to the "beauty contest" than the "auction" allocation method.)

In the final direct initial allocation phase, people learned that something (with substantial economic value that can likely be sold in the future, no less!) was very scarce, and was being given out nearly at no cost for almost the last time. It's not surprising that they would have jumped at the opportunity to get as much of it as they could qualify for, somewhat independent of what use they expected to make of it in the short term. Maybe especially when they were hearing how other people were jumping at that opportunity.

Or we could just remove the purely artificial scarcity and call it a day. The cost here is backbone table size, not endpoint addresses

There are auctions for IPv4 space, though they did not really become a thing until after the RIRs ran out of IPv4 blocks. The price per address is about $50.

Yes, and hopefully we can use that kind of mechanism to allocate 240/4 in a way that achieves very high utilization.

I sat in on the ipv6 ietf meetings. That was certainly the intent (minimal changes). I still remain confused about why people think this is such a big deal.

- changed aro. Ok, news design is better but that didn’t need to happen. Shouldn’t be a problem for anyone?

- prefixes are an addition but there are really good arguments for them and not much downside. This can be argued I think

- fusing the end system identifier in the public address was a mistake, and I thought so at the time, and I guess it’s been mostly rectified.

So what is so tragic here? ISPs just didn’t care for 20 years because the crunch was delayed. Now they do. So where did Steve screw up?

Neighbor Discovery is basically ARP wearing a trenchcoat. The only people "hurt" by the change are the ones who were parsing the output of the arp command for whatever reason.

IMHO the biggest problem is that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked. There is no mechanism to inform anybody about which address you have configured for yourself, unlike IPv4's DHCP where a central server knows everyone's address and can do things like update DNS entries and configure security devices. Autoconfiguration also didn't include critical details like "Who provides DNS for the local network?" and "What's the NTP server?". There isn't even any way to authenticate that the Router Advertisement your machine receives is valid, although this problem is shared with DHCP. The committee seems to have put a lot of faith in anycast routing, which has never been a good idea outside of toy networks.

> that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked.

Indeed. I thought I was being an idiot and just not understanding how this was supposed to work, until I learned that it just doesn't do a lot of important things. So when the day comes that I have to move my network to IPv6, I plan on continuing to use DHCP because I want the omitted functionality.

Of course, I still might be being an idiot and not understanding. Getting a solid picture of how IPv6 is supposed to work is genuinely hard to do with any confidence.

Be aware that DHCP6 doesn't work the same as DHCP. It's really intended for configuring routers, not hosts.

I wasn't aware. That's a real bummer, and a good example of the numerous kinds of gotchas that make this transition much more painful than it would otherwise have to be.

The more I learn about IPv6, the more I dread it.