IPv6 Foundations: The Internet Protocol You Should Already Be Using

Let me start with the thing nobody wants to say out loud: IPv6 is not “the future of the internet”. It is the internet. It has been a finished, deployed, standards-track protocol since 1998. Major mobile networks run IPv6-only internally. More than half of the traffic Google sees from many countries is already IPv6. The “future” framing is a comfortable lie we tell ourselves so we can keep treating IPv4 as the default and IPv6 as the weird optional thing the network nerd insists on. So let me reframe it for this article. IPv6 is the current version of the Internet Protocol. IPv4 is the legacy one. It is a 32-bit address space from 1981 that ran out of room more than a decade ago, kept alive on life support by NAT, carrier-grade NAT, and an aftermarket where people trade /24s like baseball cards. It works, in the way a 40-year-old car works: lovingly, expensively, and only because a lot of people refuse to let it die. This is a foundations post. I am going to cover the actual basics:…