Interesting article at AppleInsider on the idea that Apple may be silently pushing adoption of IPv6 through the ‘Back to My Mac’ service, which tunnels IPv6 over IPv4 using IPSec.

While Apple can’t single-handedly transfer the Internet to IPv6, it can provide killer apps that will drive adoption among consumers. That kind of thing is right up Apple’s Infinite Loop alley. The company pushed for adoption of the MPEG AAC codec with iTunes and the iPod, upgrading the world from MP3 while preventing the world’s music from being locked up in Sony’s ATRAC or Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM. Most other music players now support AAC as well.

Apple then got behind H.264 video and started pushing hard, even while file traders complained that Apple should just stick with the well known old variants of H.263 codecs used by DIVX and others, or use the proprietary codecs used by Windows Media Video and Adobe Flash. The success of iTunes helped push even Adobe’s Flash to H.264, and convinced Google and the BBC to serve their video content to iPhones using standard MPEG H.264 rather than Flash or Windows Media.

I’ve similarly wondered if this is the case with Apple’s use of SproutCore for MobileMe as an attempt to get people away from Flash. And somewhere deep in my soul I believe that Apple is driving up Linux and BSD usage by the existence of OS X, but that just may not be true.