China advances plans for national single-stack IPv6 network, and its own surveillance-friendly version of the protocol
China’s Cyberspace Administration on Tuesday issued a plan for wider adoption of IPv6 between now and 2030, and for more work on a non-standard set of services that Beijing calls “IPv6+”.
The Implementation Plan for Deepening Technological Innovation and Integrated Application of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) (2026-2030) contains the usual promises to increase use of IPv6. Beijing wants 900 million users to be connected over IPv6 by 2027, and for the protocol to carry 38 percent of network traffic. China also wants all connected devices to be IPv6-enabled by 2027.
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“By 2030, IPv6 will be widely and deeply integrated with all sectors of the economy and society, building a technologically advanced, open, innovative, self-driven, and secure IPv6 industrial ecosystem,” the regulator wrote. “The number of active IPv6 users will reach 950 million, and IPv6 will account for 42 percent of network traffic.”
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The Administration also expects that by 2030, “New networks will be prioritized for IPv6 addresses by default, accelerating the evolution towards IPv6 single-stack, and promoting the formation of a network service and application system dominated by IPv6.”
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News that China is planning for the day it runs a single-stack internet will excite some, notwithstanding the fact that IPv6 has proven less important than its creators hoped.
The most interesting part of the new plan is the call for more work on IPv6+ – a set of enhancements to IPv6 that allows those who send information to embed metadata describing content into packets and even suggest the route it should take.
As Think Tank the Mercator Institute for China Studies last year observed, IPv6+ “has obvious appeal for authoritarian regimes looking to control their citizens,” because a carrier could read metadata and act on it.
One possible action could be to allow network operators to identify traffic they would like to charge extra to carry, an idea telcos like because they feel it is unfair that they bear the burden of investing in last-mile infrastructure to deliver content from the likes of Netflix and YouTube.
Reading metadata could also enable censorship: Beijing already blocks a lot of content, and if dissidents had to identify themselves in packets, they’d be easier to find and block.
The Institute also notes that China’s telco equipment companies have implemented IPv6+ and exported kit that runs it to several nations.
That’s worrying because China already tried to create a protocol called “New IP” that also included surveillance-friendly features.
China tried to have the International Telecommunications Union sign off on New IP, despite the Internet Engineering Task Force maintaining existing IP protocols. That effort failed, but Beijing is pressing ahead with its efforts to spread its own version of IP at home and abroad.
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The new plan doesn’t suggest that Beijing abandon vanilla IPv6. Indeed, it calls for Chinese participation in global standards development.
But the document also says China will work on “national IPv6 standards and accelerate the development of national IPv6 standards in key areas.” ®
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