How many times have you heard the phrase "the future of the internet" in relation to a product or a piece of software that was very much not the future of the internet? Many, I'd wager. You may have heard it in relation to IPv6, too, which was supposed to replace IPv4.

That never happened, and IPv4 found ways to stick around, but that doesn't make IPv6 useless.

Before we dig deeper, a little explainer: IPv4 and IPV6 are the two main versions of the Internet Protocol. That's the system that gives devices addresses and lets data find its way between them. IPv6 is the newer replacement, and it was designed to solve IPv4's greatest issues, chief among which is limited address space.

The reason IPv4 resisted being replaced is that we got super good at working around its biggest limitation. There are only around 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses to go around, which sounds like a boatload, but obviously, we have more devices than that in the world at this point. When you add up every phone, laptop, PC, TV, server, and so on, there's so many more addresses that need to be in use.

But instead of replacing IPv4 outright, though, technologies like NAT let entire home networks share a single public address. Meanwhile, CGNAT lets ISPs do something similar across many customers. This stuff lumps all these different gadgets and networks together.

Today's internet is a mix: We've got some direct IPv4, some IPv4 hidden behind NAT or CGNAT, and IPv6, which is pretty far from the clean handover we originally thought was going to happen.

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