A brief catch up

Yes, DJB wrote this in 2002. Yes, in 2011 most ISPs still haven't bought IPv6 capable equipment (and those that have never configured it to enable IPv6). This isn't an interoperability failure, it's classic market failure. If IPvDJB actually did anything, and thus cost money, the ISPs wouldn't have bought that either.

The ISPs chose not to buy IPv6-capable equipment. Cisco and others have been selling IPv6-capable gear for about a decade, and the hardware routers (which need custom hardware or at least FPGAs to process a different unit address size) have been available for more than five years. ISPs haven't been saying "Do you make an IPv6 capable version of the thing we bought last time?" they've been saying "Is IPv4-only cheaper? We are putting off all non-essential purchases to drive down costs.". The ISPs chose not to deploy IPv6 capable end user devices to their customers because it keeps the acquisition cost low. The ISPs chose not to do any configuration work, because that means manpower and technical manpower is expensive. Plus it might mean engineering outages, and customers hate those.

Left to their own devices the water companies in my country don't repair water mains, the train operators never buy new trains, the nuclear power industry take increasingly unsafe shortcuts. So we have to regulate them in order to force them to internalise long term costs. We don't regulate Internet service provision to this extent, many believe we shouldn't have to. Perhaps not, but this time it's going to cost us.

Hardware people, like Cisco, and software people, like Microsoft or Linus came through on this, not always as fast as we'd have liked, but in time at least for the inevitable crunch. That left only one key stakeholder, the ISPs and they're twiddling their thumbs. But by all means blame the engineers, nobody had any doubt from the outset who'd get the blame. If we don't do the impossible day after day it's because we just weren't trying.

The "simple fact" that several of you seem hung up on is a mathematical truth. It's not avoidable by any amount of shenanigans on our part. Repeating that someone, somehow, should have found a way around this is nothing but active denial.