On January 26, CloudFlare joined the "World IPv6 Launch" being organized by The Internet Society. If you haven't heard about it, it is an effort to encourage companies commit to "permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services" by 6 June 2012 -- see http://www.worldipv6launch.org/ for details.
Of course you might ask "Wait. I thought CloudFlare already supported IPv6?" Indeed we do, and we're proud that we've helped grow the IPv6 Internet significantly. As Matthew mentioned in a recent blog post, we are already providing IPv6 web service to 10% of the Alexa top 1 million websites that support IPv6.
Unfortunately, currently, only about 1% of the top million websites support IPv6. We'd like to help significantly increase that percentage. We believe this is important because we feel IPv6 provides the best way to allow the Internet to continue to grow and be a platform for innovation. Without IPv6, connecting to the Internet will become increasing expensive (as the costs ISPs must pay to obtain IPv4 addresses increase) and fragile as people are forced behind increasingly complex and error-prone Network Address Translation technologies.
While we have some ideas on how to encourage more of our customers turn on our Automatic IPv6 Gateway, we'd like to ask you for your suggestions: what can we do to help break the IPv6 chicken-or-egg problem? How can we help motivate ISPs to offer IPv6 support when there's little content is on IPv6? And how can we motivate content providers to put their content on IPv6 when so few ISPs support it?
We're working to make IPv6 support as easy as possible, but if there's more we could be doing, please let us know.