Let's face it, even if he managed to get it working for himself, he'd still have to fight to get it adopted. The way I see it, most people won't care and simply think it would be too much of a hassle to switch to anything. The ones who do care cannot wait to have everything in IPv6.
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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And given how "fast" IPv6 adoption has been, switch to something non-IP based is not going to happen any time soon.
Also, while I kind of get the idea author is talking about, pulling random addresses out of thin air and managing routing for that, even on a small scale, is going to have a crapload problems. Without subnet hierarchy with routes, gateways and stuff would mean something like globally broadcasted ARP packets and absolutely massive routing tables on endpoints. Plus with that approach the reslience of IP-networks would be lost (or routing tables would need to grow even more).
Also there's some pretty big issues with malicious actors on the network, incompatibility with every router on planet and a ton more. What that kind of approach working globally would need is some scifi-level networking without latency or bandwidth limitations.
You still need some way of identifying individual devices on the Internet, if not an IP address, then something that may as well be.
Every network card has a MAC address, but those aren't routable.
There’s nothing saying that you can’t have a global decentralized network, but the Internet Protocol is pretty central to the network we call the Internet.
So... just the P?
Sky cool, I'm thinking of the same except I'm far dumber. I'm also thinking of something which can't be a drop-in replacement, because in my ideology having an address and a session between these addresses is wrong by itself - the base data entity for the network should be a message retranslated wherever and however, perhaps in places subscribed to its partition (that being some kind of number\token\topic\hellknowswhat), while everything involving transient things like sessions and packets should be a layer down and interchangeable, the common layer of the world network should be a bit like Usenet. The whole idea of connecting to a machine over the network seems for me disadvantageous for the best kinds of use - publishing of texts and files, and communication in general, and also advantageous for silos. That imagined good common layer can work over the Internet among other things, but it can be easily adoptable for carrying archives on USB sticks, or exchanging data some other way, where the message travels over these just as well as over the Internet-connected parts. A bit like Briar, except Briar solves real tasks and I'm having a BAD psychosis.