If you’re looking for sympathy, you got it. Fuck the state.

If you’re looking for solutions, use a cheap $5/mo VPS that exists purely as your gateway host. Run everything you want on your home machines, then tunnel the traffic to your gateway and reverse-proxy it there. Your data stays in your hands, you can spin up and expose new services publicly in a matter of minutes, AND your home IP isn’t vulnerable to doxxing or DoS.

My ISP is a local deal, well-known for protecting privacy, and run by an absolute nerd (in the best way possible, also outspoken about privacy, FOSS, and other such things). Their customer service is second-to-none; I had an issue with my static IP a couple years back, and had an actual engineer on the line within a few hours. On a weekend.

It’s XMission. I dropped Comcast for them once they were in my area. Comcast can climb up a cactus.

I think you’re giving their ability to coordinate too much credit. Best guess the ISPs are just withholding anything that requires investment to deploy or that they can monetize themselves. Everybody else is just bottom-feeding by selling workarounds wherever the ISPs can’t or won’t.

The invisible hand of the market sucks at creating optimal solutions, but it does great at creating scammy crap that will take your money, no conspiracy necessary.

Most users have no use for a static adress space. Those are usually business or power-user needs.
This you are classified as that. A power-user.

I think there are still enough v4-only systems out there that you don’t really want to host a mail server on v6. You are right though that it would be nice to be able to get static v6 (or for that matter v4) addresses from home isp’s. Some do offer that of course.

Another issue can be that the average home internet user has no idea keep even a client system secure. So ISP’s might use NAT and default firewall configurations partly to stop incoming connections on the theory that they are likely to be malicious. On home routers you can usually open ports if you know what you’re doing. I don’t know if that’s even possible on mobile phones.

The big issue is that your network provider is also the physical provider, and there’s no real competition as a result.

When most people got their Internet service over telephone lines, your ISP didn’t need to also own the telephone lines, they just needed some telephone numbers.

When the telcos themselves got into the business of providing internet access, they pushed out the competition.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act, written by a Republican Congress, and signed into law by a Democratic president (Clinton) is largely responsible for the current state of affairs.

The “Information Superhighway” is a toll road, built by taxes, but owned by private corporations.

What’s crazy is that the government paid these corporations to build this infrastructure.

When your government pays, say, a road building company to build roads, one doesn’t then grant the ownership of those roads to that company.

But that is EXACTLY what we did with our communications infrastructure.

That is basically what they do yes. ISPs are the only thing standing in between the entirety of humanity and out of the box selfhosting. With fixed IPv6 IP addresses you could build and sell devices that just self host all your stuff out of the box. You could just sell complete normie people a “cloud box” that they can slap in their home for a one time cost that will take care of all their cloud storage and smart device needs. You could integrate it into any smartphone OS ootb so that all you have to do is scan a QR code on the “cloud box” and it connects all your apps that need it to it.

You’re not wrong. And the line between evil and laziness here is too messy for me to sort out. We got into this mess because the internet was originally designed as a communication tool between business, university, and government. Specifically, Bell Labs connecting universities as part of the military project DARPA. Since they were connecting dozens of sites, the 4 billion addresses (2^32) seemed like plenty.

Skipping over dialup and forward to early broadband, the issue of the number of addresses problem was ‘solved’ by a clever firewall technique network address translation (NAT). It was adversited as a security feature, but it allowed ISPs to give one public IP per customer. This standardized things for them - they give you one IP and you multiplex it as you wish. However, since the average customer wanted a turnkey solution, the ISPs would then toss in the modem as a rental. (Also, as enshitification hit this rental modem started getting more user hostile.)

But at this point ISPs are engorged and lazy and redoing everything is a chore, so they got one IPv6 space for everyone, and set up their IPv6 servers to assign chucks of that space based on your assigned IPv4 address. Easy-peasy! Now none of their other management or billing systems have to change! Of course, now your v6 space moves anytime your v4 space does but -they always have those business accounts to sell you …

A diamond in the rough: When I was younger, working at a data center and IPv6 was new, I found this gem coupled with IPv6 world day (via Reddit): https://tunnelbroker.net/

Hurricane Electric was/is happy to give you a free static IPv6 /48 prefix, and you could tunnel your home connection directly to this (like a site to site VPN). Their catch is if you start pushing significant traffic you’ll have to pay market rates. But if your goal is to add a free static IPv6 frontend to your home network, this has been here the whole time.

Similarly, I’ve read Cloudflare’s Terms of Service [privacy policy, et al.] and they’re fairly tame compared to many. I’m also partial to their WARP technology. The idea is the end user’s traffic is encrypted and sent to any of Cloudflare’s servers and from there they can then bounce to anywhere in the world (a handy trick if you need to get around a great firewall or other tools of censorship). If your home lab uses Cloudflare’s tunnel, and your phones use WARP, the only thing a third party can see it that you’re using the largest CDN in the world - which is sorta a ‘well, duh’ statement. Cloudflare’s schtick is they don’t need limits - they can flood you home connection and it wouldn’t be a blip on their radar. However, they need to run variations of these technologies to operate their primary business. So making a copy for you to use is almost trivial. (And if you go viral and suddenly need a CDN, I’m sure they can sell you some)

Tl;dr: you’re not wrong, but the desert has water in it, if you know where to look.

This is a huge problem. We need to start our own ISPS. Municipal owned or alongside a microgrid co-op are good options

Huh???

Honestly I don’t see your problem, a nuance? Sure! An unsolvable problem? For sure not.

If you want to have your system reachable from the Wan then you will need a domain name. If you have a domain name then it is needed to be resolved by a dns server.

If there is a dns resolver then you would able to update it dynamically every time your ip changes.

True that the time alive of the dns records must be low enough to ensure that an ip change does not let your system down for an unacceptable amount of time.

Capitalist institutions push capitalism? What kind of world is this!

Asymmetric bandwidth is literally designed to ensure you remain a consumer and is actively inhibiting the collaborative, communal web utopia we were told was going to be the future.

It’s a pain but also it’s no surprise that DNS and ipv6 are premium when ipv4 and dynamic IP works so well for 99% of us. Even if you wanna host something publicly there are totally free services and software tools to cover most if not all caveats of not using ipv6 (for now).

I have selfhosted for years and only paid for a domain name recently.

Vodafone gave me an IPv4 in Germany no problem. I asked and they gave it to me. They said it’s not static, but it hasn’t changed for me in years.