Most people talked about how the system was designed, but I’m going to ask about what you mean from a different point of view. What use would that system be?
Everyone carries around their own personal DNS in the form of an address book. It used to be a physical book; now it is integrated to your phone. There used to be a physical book of most people’s phone numbers, but that practice went away as spam calls became a larger problem and people stopped using the DNS book, the Yellow Pages, for looking up commercial numbers.
Second is phone numbers aren’t as valuable as IP address numbers.
The theoretical limit to phone numbers in the USA and Canada, which has a combined system, is 10 billion while not taking into account special numbers like 911 or that 555 numbers don’t work. That’s still enough for everyone within the USA and Canada to have a personal and work phone number with plenty to spare. If that becomes too much, the system can be changed to add more digita relatively easily.
In contrast, large parts of the Internet still works on IPv4. This is a problem as IPv4 only has about 4 billion IP address and every device has to have an IP address to work. I’ve got at least 5 devices that need an IP address to work while I only have one device that needs a phone number. So, the system of assigning IP addresses gets very complicated and DNS smooths that process to end users.
In practice the stagnation of IPv6 seems to be a recognition of the unintended security that NAT with IPv4 adds. From a security perspective, having every device use a public IP and trying to prevent malicious software from simply opening whatever ports it needs per device would be a headache.
How about security through obscurity, to some extent? An IPv6 address isn’t a needle in a haystack, it’s a needle floating somewhere in the solar system. I think I have a quadrillion addresses assigned to me?
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique IP addresses is a staggering amount to scan, no matter what horsepower you have to deploy.
NAT brings no security, especially in this scenario. If you want to prevent malicious software from opening ports, you use a public facing firewall on your gateway. Which you should have for IPv4 as well.
Most people talked about how the system was designed, but I’m going to ask about what you mean from a different point of view. What use would that system be?
Everyone carries around their own personal DNS in the form of an address book. It used to be a physical book; now it is integrated to your phone. There used to be a physical book of most people’s phone numbers, but that practice went away as spam calls became a larger problem and people stopped using the DNS book, the Yellow Pages, for looking up commercial numbers.
Second is phone numbers aren’t as valuable as IP address numbers.
The theoretical limit to phone numbers in the USA and Canada, which has a combined system, is 10 billion while not taking into account special numbers like 911 or that 555 numbers don’t work. That’s still enough for everyone within the USA and Canada to have a personal and work phone number with plenty to spare. If that becomes too much, the system can be changed to add more digita relatively easily.
In contrast, large parts of the Internet still works on IPv4. This is a problem as IPv4 only has about 4 billion IP address and every device has to have an IP address to work. I’ve got at least 5 devices that need an IP address to work while I only have one device that needs a phone number. So, the system of assigning IP addresses gets very complicated and DNS smooths that process to end users.
In practice the stagnation of IPv6 seems to be a recognition of the unintended security that NAT with IPv4 adds. From a security perspective, having every device use a public IP and trying to prevent malicious software from simply opening whatever ports it needs per device would be a headache.
How about security through obscurity, to some extent? An IPv6 address isn’t a needle in a haystack, it’s a needle floating somewhere in the solar system. I think I have a quadrillion addresses assigned to me?
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique IP addresses is a staggering amount to scan, no matter what horsepower you have to deploy.
It’s slow but stagnation is a disingenuous way of putting it. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
NAT brings no security, especially in this scenario. If you want to prevent malicious software from opening ports, you use a public facing firewall on your gateway. Which you should have for IPv4 as well.