> Like someone at your work had all these great ideas, started implementing them, then quit when they realized it would be too difficult to complete.
The problem is, in many of these fields actual real-world politics come into play - you got governments not wanting to lose the capability to do DNS censorship or other forms of sabotage, you got piss poor countries barely managing to keep the faintest of lights on, you got ISPs with systems that have grown over literal decades where any kind of major breaking change would require investments into rearchitecture larger than the company is worth, you got government regulations mandating stuff like all communications of staff be logged (e.g. banking/finance) which is made drastically more complex if TLS cannot be intercepted or where interceptor solutions must be certified making updates to them about as slow as molasses...
Considering we have 3 major tech companies (Microsoft/Apple/Google) controlling 90+% of user devices and browsers, I believe this is more solvable than we'd like to admit.
Browsers are just one tiny piece of the fossilization issue. We got countless vendors of networking gear, we got clouds (just how many AWS, Azure and GCP services are capable of running IPv6 only, or how many of these clouds can actually run IPv6 dual-stack in production grade?), we got even more vendors of interception middlebox gear (from reverse proxies and load balancers, SSL breaker proxies over virus scanners for web and mail to captive portal boxes for public wifi networks), we got a shitload of phone telco gear of which probably a lot has long since expired maintenance and is barely chugging along.
Ok. You added OEMs to the list, but then just named the same three dominant players as clouds. Last I checked, every device on the planet supports IPv6, if not those other protocols. Everything from the cheapest home WiFi router, to every Layer 3 switch sold in the last 20-years.
I think this is a 20-year old argument, and it’s largely irrelevant in 2024.
> I think this is a 20-year old argument, and it’s largely irrelevant in 2024.
It's not irrelevant - AWS lacks support for example in EKS or in ELB target groups, where it's actually vital [1]. GCE also lacks IPv6 for some services and you gotta pay extra [2]. Azure doesn't support IPv6-only at all, a fair few services don't support IPv6 [3].
The problem is, in many of these fields actual real-world politics come into play - you got governments not wanting to lose the capability to do DNS censorship or other forms of sabotage, you got piss poor countries barely managing to keep the faintest of lights on, you got ISPs with systems that have grown over literal decades where any kind of major breaking change would require investments into rearchitecture larger than the company is worth, you got government regulations mandating stuff like all communications of staff be logged (e.g. banking/finance) which is made drastically more complex if TLS cannot be intercepted or where interceptor solutions must be certified making updates to them about as slow as molasses...