IPv6 certainly hasn’t “won” in the sense that it’s nowhere near where it should have been by now, but I would definitely not say we need to make something else that also isn’t ipv4 and thus also isn’t forward compatible.
IPv6 is still the only game in town as a successor technology to IPv4, and it makes no sense to invent some other new thing.
The real question at hand, is do we keep trying to make IPv6 happen, or do we give up and just deal with IPv4 until the end of time. (It’s not an obvious answer. L7 load balancing and IP anycast makes it so you can basically run an entire tech company on a single IPv4 address. CGNAT is becoming more and more commonplace. The pressure on IPv4 availability is alleviating all the time. Maybe 4 billion addresses will ultimately be enough for humanity, who knows.)
But I mean it when I say that if we continue as is and just sorta gradually, grudgingly add IPv6 on a best-effort basis, it’ll likely be 100 years or so before we can actually turn off IPv4.
IPv6 is still the only game in town as a successor technology to IPv4, and it makes no sense to invent some other new thing.
The real question at hand, is do we keep trying to make IPv6 happen, or do we give up and just deal with IPv4 until the end of time. (It’s not an obvious answer. L7 load balancing and IP anycast makes it so you can basically run an entire tech company on a single IPv4 address. CGNAT is becoming more and more commonplace. The pressure on IPv4 availability is alleviating all the time. Maybe 4 billion addresses will ultimately be enough for humanity, who knows.)
But I mean it when I say that if we continue as is and just sorta gradually, grudgingly add IPv6 on a best-effort basis, it’ll likely be 100 years or so before we can actually turn off IPv4.