depends on how you look at it. Right now it's very much a tragedy of the commons.

IPv6 not being supported in many places means the internet is more centralised, less likely to use proper p2p tech- because it's a lot harder to make it work rather than throwing up a TURN box and relaying everything.

"The latency? Who cares? IPv6 sometimes breaks right now" - because nobody is testing it, so why should people be the first to support it? There's no easy upside.

The only real upside for businesses is not having to pay for increasingly expensive IPv4 allocations. But they don't really care, its not nearly expensive enough yet. Customers will get GCNAT, businesses will continue as normal.

All that will happen is that the internet gets slower and less equal.

Which is exactly the same thing that's happening with inefficient memory hungry software: people either have to buy a more expensive laptop or they have a shitty experience.. Nobody is advocating for them, they just feel things getting shittier year on year and many are just choosing to avoid technology instead.

> Of all the things to regulate why bother with this one? It's not like IPv6 is better for the environment or useful to the consumer.

If I'm with a small-time ISP that has to use CG-NAT because they don't have the cash to buy/lease enough IPv4 addresses to give one to each CPE WAN interface, then using things like Xbox/PS multiplayer/P2P gaming is no longer possible. Want to host a Minecraft server? Too bad.

Are those two use-cases "useful to the consumer"?

It reduces the monopolization power of big cloud providers. This is especially relevant to countries that aren't the US, because it reduces reliance on the US.

It also just reduces resource waste (of labor time). Countries like China that have insufficient IPv4 addresses and political power have mandated it. One IP per home is manageable, for now, but CGNAT is really bad.

Actually not as much point now.

The reason to regulate in maybe 2000 or so was that staying with IPv4 led to NAT. NAT led to it being impossible for users to receive incoming connections. Inability to receive incoming connections led to (a) horrendous protocol complexity, (b) probably some applications never even being invented, and, (c) everybody using ultra-centralized services. Ultra-centralized services led to advertising-driven distortions of service utility, concentration of political and economic power, and choke points. Choke points led to surveillance state bullshit that's just fully ripening today.

And, yes, this was (in broad outline) foreseeable in 2000. I wasn't the only one.

We are locked into apple and google backup services because of CGNAT. If ipv6, and symmetric fiber internet, was ubiquitous when smartphones came out, there could have been a competing option that backs up your own data to an appliance in your own home.