The IPv6 protocol is among the list of important things that make up the backbone of the internet, and yet barely anyone talks about it. Designed in 1998 as a replacement for IPv4 and its limited number of addresses, IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction — despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solving all network number assignments in one fell swoop.
That changed over time by force of necessity, and Google's tracking graph shows that for a brief moment in time on March 28, 50% of worldwide users accessed the service over an IPv6 connection, marking a historic first. APNIC's stats show that the protocol is in use by 43% of the world, with Asia and the Americas inching ever close to those 50%. Cloudflare, meanwhile, shows that 40% of traffic is done in IPv6, an actually impressive figure if you consider it's measuring actual transferred packets rather than just counting addresses.
