Guy Kewney

One recurring theme over the past 10 years has been the futility of encouraging the industry to do sensible things.

I love writing this column – if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be 10 years old – so it is strange to find it a chore this week. For reasons that would take up too much space with too little value, this edition was written in an unusually gloomy state of mind, with the question “Why do people read it?” weighing heavily.

Most pundits have this problem. But this week, in response to a discussion about mobile internet usage, I dug into the archives to look back over the history of IPv6 – and at the end of that, I’m deeply depressed. Punditry always says “Let’s do it!” and various columns going back a lot more than 10 years seem all to have been built on one theme: “Why is it taking so long?”

My very first domain was set up for me by an IPv6 enthusiast, who was running one of the first ISPs in the UK – long before broadband. Today, I have a personal hobby site, which I host at home on a beat-up old space heater. Henry McGeough, when he set up kewney.com for me, warned me that, “You’ll never be able to have your own domain at home without IPv6”, and he had v6 hosting available on his “virtual PC” service in the mid 1990s.

The history of v6 punditry is full of smug gloating that “It can’t be avoided, because Japan will drive it”; and “You just wait till mobile usage takes off”; or “Unless we move to v6, the internet can’t be secure, so its adoption is inevitable”, along with dark warnings that v4 will probably cause a plague.

And yet, if you go to www.ipv6.org today, you will find this remark: “Most of today’s internet uses IPv4, which is now nearly 20 years old. IPv4 has been remarkably resilient in spite of its age, but it is beginning to have problems. Most importantly, there is a growing shortage of IPv4 addresses, which are needed by all new machines added to the internet.”

Apart from the “20 years old” bit, all that could have been written a decade ago by Henry. Are we all wasting our time?