Tinfoil hat Just wait, once the US government at large finally understands IPv4 networking, someone with too much power will look at IPv6 and the phrase "Look we don't have to do NAT anymore!" Then the government will assign a unique IPv6 address or two to every citizen to use as ID (they'll need a replacement anyway once they get rid of social security). Then they mandate the ISPs to track IPs, and they make it illegal to share or mask IP/IDs since that's something only pirates and thieves and other bad people do anyway. And we'll look back and say "Remember The Right to Read? rms was right again!"
If governments were to do that, they would also be forced to solve the problem of the routing table explosion. Which is a hard problem.
As for unique ID - it's already doable and being done without any IPv6. Read up on evercookie. There was an article on HN a while ago about a bunch of advertisers doing just that.
This is worse than the government having it - not only it gets abused, but someone gets rich on this.
Unique internet IDs are far from a conspiracy theory. They're being actively developed in China and South Korea to name a few. While the South Korean one has faced setbacks it's only a matter of time before they become common place in other countries in my opinion.
