Sunday, October 25, 2015

Mission: Possible

You've probably seen our mission statement: "Promoting the adoption of IPv6 for the preservation of an open Internet." Mission statements seem to be a dime a dozen these days, so let's look at just how important this work really is.

At the All Things Open conference last year, one of the speakers talked of "dorm room ready software". It's wonderful that this plethora of software has become available, increasing the speed of prototyping. However, the only reason this is still possible is because those dorm rooms still have global IP addresses. The computer sitting on the desk can still serve content to the world. As we run out of IPv4 addresses, more and more of us will be closed off behind NATs beyond our control. Poor college students can ill afford hosting services that still have those scarce IPv4 addresses. This creates another barrier to innovation unless we do something.