(Sorry if this is too off-topic:) ISPs seem designed to funnel people to capitalist cloud services, or at least I feel like that. And it endlessly frustrates me.
The reason is even though IPv6 addresses are widely available (unlike IPv4), most ISPs won’t allow consumers to request a static rather than a dynamic IPv6 prefix along with a couple of IPv6 reverse DNS entries.
Instead, this functionality is gatekept behind expensive premium or even business contracts, in many cases even requiring legal paperwork proving you have a registered business, so that the common user is completely unable to self-host e.g. a fully functional IPv6-only mail server with reverse DNS, even if they wanted to.
The common workaround is to suck up to the cloud, and rent a VPS, or some other foreign controlled machine that can be easily intercepted and messed with, and where the service can be surveilled better by big money.
I’m posting this since I hope more people will realize that this is going on, and both complain to their ISPs, but most notably to regulatory bodies and to generally spread the word. If we want true digital autonomy to be more common, I feel like this needs to be fixed for consumer landline contracts.
Or did I miss something that makes this make sense outside of a big money capitalist angle?
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The big issue is that your network provider is also the physical provider, and there’s no real competition as a result.
When most people got their Internet service over telephone lines, your ISP didn’t need to also own the telephone lines, they just needed some telephone numbers.
When the telcos themselves got into the business of providing internet access, they pushed out the competition.
The 1996 Telecommunications Act, written by a Republican Congress, and signed into law by a Democratic president (Clinton) is largely responsible for the current state of affairs.
The “Information Superhighway” is a toll road, built by taxes, but owned by private corporations.
What’s crazy is that the government paid these corporations to build this infrastructure.
When your government pays, say, a road building company to build roads, one doesn’t then grant the ownership of those roads to that company.
But that is EXACTLY what we did with our communications infrastructure.
You’re not wrong. And the line between evil and laziness here is too messy for me to sort out. We got into this mess because the internet was originally designed as a communication tool between business, university, and government. Specifically, Bell Labs connecting universities as part of the military project DARPA. Since they were connecting dozens of sites, the 4 billion addresses (2^32) seemed like plenty.
Skipping over dialup and forward to early broadband, the issue of the number of addresses problem was ‘solved’ by a clever firewall technique network address translation (NAT). It was adversited as a security feature, but it allowed ISPs to give one public IP per customer. This standardized things for them - they give you one IP and you multiplex it as you wish. However, since the average customer wanted a turnkey solution, the ISPs would then toss in the modem as a rental. (Also, as enshitification hit this rental modem started getting more user hostile.)
But at this point ISPs are engorged and lazy and redoing everything is a chore, so they got one IPv6 space for everyone, and set up their IPv6 servers to assign chucks of that space based on your assigned IPv4 address. Easy-peasy! Now none of their other management or billing systems have to change! Of course, now your v6 space moves anytime your v4 space does but -they always have those business accounts to sell you …
A diamond in the rough: When I was younger, working at a data center and IPv6 was new, I found this gem coupled with IPv6 world day (via Reddit): https://tunnelbroker.net/
Hurricane Electric was/is happy to give you a free static IPv6 /48 prefix, and you could tunnel your home connection directly to this (like a site to site VPN). Their catch is if you start pushing significant traffic you’ll have to pay market rates. But if your goal is to add a free static IPv6 frontend to your home network, this has been here the whole time.
Similarly, I’ve read Cloudflare’s Terms of Service [privacy policy, et al.] and they’re fairly tame compared to many. I’m also partial to their WARP technology. The idea is the end user’s traffic is encrypted and sent to any of Cloudflare’s servers and from there they can then bounce to anywhere in the world (a handy trick if you need to get around a great firewall or other tools of censorship). If your home lab uses Cloudflare’s tunnel, and your phones use WARP, the only thing a third party can see it that you’re using the largest CDN in the world - which is sorta a ‘well, duh’ statement. Cloudflare’s schtick is they don’t need limits - they can flood you home connection and it wouldn’t be a blip on their radar. However, they need to run variations of these technologies to operate their primary business. So making a copy for you to use is almost trivial. (And if you go viral and suddenly need a CDN, I’m sure they can sell you some)
Tl;dr: you’re not wrong, but the desert has water in it, if you know where to look.
There are some good ISPs out there. My ISP in Australia (Leaptel) gives me the option to enable static IPv6 /48 for free.
Cries in American 🇺🇸😿
Use hostnames and dynamic prefixes or addresses don’t really matter. Haven’t had an issue in years and my last isp changed prefixes multiple times a week. I mean technically it would not be available for five minutes when IP changes but never noticed.
It’s just one more bullshit thing to set up, but yeah I might be doing it soon.
They don’t care about “capitalist cloud services”, they just care about money. If they can charge you a premium for more advanced features (they can) then they will.
Starlink gives me an ipv6 its not static as such but a dynamic DNS can solve that issue. My ISP issue is that my mobile provider doesn’t give me an ipv6 at all so I can’t route to my home server without a gateway to proxy.
Starlink is worse that many other options. I would avoid it if you can.
Except I’m in rural Australia. Star link is objectively the best option.
It sucks that rural Australia’s part of the NBN got kneecapped down to Skymuster. I’ve played with Starlink quite a while ago and unless it’s really heavy rain it works really well up to the point of being able to stream games on GeForce NOW. Obviously a fast wired connection is preferable but as you say Starlink really is the only good option for a lot of people.
IPv6 costs money to implement so it doesn’t happen without good reason.
For ISPs you need many options so that one company can’t take all the business. In my area competition is steep so fiber is cheap. In rural areas I’m personally interested in community or small ISPs. Surely some people could get together and make something better.
rural ISPs still need a connection to the greater internet, what options are there when the closest non-shitty option is hundreds of miles away?
Vodafone gave me an IPv4 in Germany no problem. I asked and they gave it to me. They said it’s not static, but it hasn’t changed for me in years.
Xfinity in the states is like that too. Technically I don’t have a static but it’s only changed twice in 4 years or so.
Once was during a really really bad storm which took power down in my state for days so I don’t blame them, and the other one was when they did work on my local node but they sent out an email and a letter before hand lol
<<<< has ipv4 static ip to my house. I do pay a small premium though. Like $15 bucks.
$5 for mine
We seriously need an international co-operative (Worker-owned) ISP.
If you have control over at least the root of your network you can totally get away with hosting in a dynamic pub ip. You just need to set up dynamicdns. There are other ways of handling this specific issue too. You can always go to a colocation and set up a server there if you want. You could also create your own reverse proxy tunnel in a place that is public then forward it. There are lots of work arounds really. Yeah, it sucks that American ISPs generally don’t support ipv6 but there are totally ways to work around it all.
What really gets me up in arms is when they advertise gigabit connections or 500mb speeds only to limit upload to 20mb/s. That is where they are actively inhibiting self hosting communities.
If you only care about having a static IPv6 address take a look at TunnelBroker by Hurricane Electric. They give you free /48 IPv6 blocks tunnelled through their network. Words of warning though: 1) some ISPs block using this service (prevent the tunnel from working), 2) in my experience I’ve seen high latency due to weird routing, 3) those IPs ending up on blocklists due to abuse and 4) the tunnel is unencrypted so traffic between you and Hurricane Electric is trivially intercepted, though if that was a problem in the first place then you wouldn’t be hosting from your home network anyway so this is mostly moot.
Yeah it’s fucked up.
I’ve noticed that on my cell phone’s cell connection, I can’t access my home server, but I can access my cloud site. I’m guessing either XFinity blocks connections from cell IPs thinking they’re spam, or my cell carrier blocks connections to home IPs thinking they’re scams.
With a little more debugging I’ll either change cell carriers or ISPs soon I hope. If I have to register a business maybe I’ll make an LLC and run a lemonade stand or something lol.
Capitalist institutions push capitalism? What kind of world is this!
This is a huge problem. We need to start our own ISPS. Municipal owned or alongside a microgrid co-op are good options
