World IPv6 Day

The Internet Society (ISOC) is coordinating the efforts of several major internet organisations to promote today’s World IPv6 Day. The major players involved in todays test include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Akamai, Limelight Networks and many others: the ISOC web site lists a total of over 400 participating web sites. All of these, for this one day, have committed to offer their content over IPv6 in what is described as a “test flight”. In my opinion it is about time that IPv6 will be used as the major IP protocol as IPv4 addresses are (nearly) exhausted. But this yields another issue – a privacy one – as there are no so-called privacy extensions in the native IPv6 stack. As much as I can understand advertisers and content providers to have end-to-end IP connections again to be able to track each and every customer, as much do I like my own privacy and not everyone snooping around my private network at home.

What I hope to see in the future is native IPv6 addresses on mobile devices to be able to roam around the net and be able to seamlessly connect your VPN endpoints, SIP and therefore VoIP connections and be free again.

If someone is interested in some little stats like myself, have a look at the DE-CIX traffic stats. And yes, BTW, it’s really tera bits per second. Wow!