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low whistle I imagine they paid a pretty penny for those /12s. A thought comes to me: If IPv6 adoption continues to drag along, and AWS/Azure/GCP continue to e

low whistle I imagine they paid a pretty penny for those /12s. A thought comes to me: If IPv6 adoption continues to drag along, and AWS/Azure/GCP continue to expand their IP blocks like this, how quickly are we in danger of the cloud providers effectively being the Internet?

Ambroos 5y ago
I guess there's a large pool of IP addresses used by residential ISPs that could be recycled relatively easily. When I lived in Ireland I only got a public IPv6, my IPv4 was behind CG-NAT. The nerd in me wasn't a fan of that on paper, but in reality I didn't have any issues with it. I could see ISPs making a quick buck by switching to CG-NAT on IPv4 so they can sell off their IPv4 blocks. Those IPs being recycled for servers/services doesn't seem too risky, given that they're not typically hosting anything.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  I find the ipv6 address scary because IP geolocation gives that in the same city district. Cgnat would be better because the server would see ipv4 of the ISP. I don't know, is there a way to not show my ipv6 and fall back on cgnat address because that looks much more secure in terms of not getting doxed and ad tracked.
  - andruby 5y ago
    I assume a vpn, ssh tunnel, wireguard or any other type of proxy would hide your residential ip.
  - sp332 5y ago
    Sure, just disable IPv6 support in your OS.
    - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
      apparently android doesnt allow that on wifi so out of luck.
  - tolien 5y ago
    That’s not inherent to IPv6 though, your ISP chose to be more specific in the location data for those addresses. If it’s sufficiently detailed as to “dox” you, maybe ask them not to do that?
    - wu_187 5y ago
      Both AT&T and Comcast do this with IPv4 as well.
      - tolien 5y ago
        Yeah, NTL/Virgin Media in the UK do the same in that their IPs geolocate to where the node/head end is. In a city, it's not going to be specific enough to uniquely identify you but it's still weird seeing ads that aren't that far away. On the other hand, the IPv4/v6 addresses on my A&A connection geolocate to either London or Bracknell (where their office is), about 400 miles away. I get a lot of pointless ads for things in Surrey that I have no intention of visiting.
        2Gkashmiri 5y ago
        i have never used google search but the other day someone used that infront of me and on the bottom i saw what appeared to be "pin code for approximating your current location for local results" and something to that end. that scared me big time because this was like my home pin code, my small city has like 30 so this is narrowing me down to a single one which i am not comfortable with
        tolien 5y ago
        Right, but is Google doing this with the information they get from your IP address or something else entirely? Is it just coincidence that your IP address corresponds to your ISP’s office which happens to be relatively local? With loose enough permissions your browser has a geolocation API that, depending on your device, will be a hell of a lot more accurate (if you have Wi-Fi hardware it can use that to work out where it is relative to the known locations of the SSIDs it can see, or straight-out use GPS). None of this has anything to do with IPv6 - you give away some location information with your username and profile on this very site, for example.
- JPDeckers 5y ago
  Problem with CGNAT is the costs involved in bookkeeping for law enforcement. Where an IPv4 solution for your clients only needs change-logging on IPbinding-to-client level, the CG-NAT requires you as an ISP to log every outgoing IPv4/port combination with timestamp to client mapping. Which requires A LOT more storage and much more expensive equipment. Going rate per IPv4 is up to $40 nowadays, selling of your v4 block might not be cost-efficient.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - minimaster 5y ago
    Disclaimer: I work with this stuff and might be a little biased to certain vendor solutions. A good CGNAT implementations have support for static blocks: the subscriber always ends up a a specific ipnumber+portblock combination. (Each subscriber is assigned a specific number of exit ports and this all just logged once during startup so you always know where each subscriber ends up). Should they run out of their assigned portblock, there are pools which you can borrow from (these need then to be logged who borrowed at what time etc). So all in all there is less logging than when everything was dynamic.
    - endre 5y ago
      And law enforcement inquiries barely contain source port information, or precise time. Most of then go like: who had this IP in $this-two-weeks-window. No source port, no destination IP/port.
      - philderbeast 5y ago
        that will just lead to a whole lot of "we dont have that information" or alternativly, "all of these 10000 people used that, have fun!"
        floatboth 5y ago
        And isn't that the privacy we all would really enjoy? :D
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > WThe nerd in me wasn't a fan of that on paper, but in reality I didn't have any issues with it. No issues? So, how are people supposed to be able to access your machine then?
  - tehbeard 5y ago
    Why should I want people to be accessing my personal desktop/laptop/tablet?
    - edoceo 5y ago
      It's cause you want to get to your home boxen from outside.
      - dbmnt 5y ago
        There are other solutions to this problem now. Tailscale comes to mind.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        Surely you know this is a super niche requirement? You can use IP6 or a commercial rather than domestic ISP if you really need to do it.
        olyjohn 5y ago
        It might not be so niche if we weren't all behind NAT firewalls. There would probably be a whole lot more applications that do direct connections between two people, and eliminate the middle-man. There's a reason every major service out there has their applications set up in some cloud to relay the messages back and forth between clients.
      - sp332 5y ago
        That was not the question, it said "people".
  - sp332 5y ago
- dehrmann 5y ago
  I've had a static ipv4 address on a home internet connection for almost 10 years, now. They're out there...
  - phatfish 5y ago
    Yup, ISPs in countries that got a nice big block if addresses in the early days can still manage this. I have a cable connection that was originally provided by NTL (now Virgin Media). My IPv4 address changes about once a year now as they do upgrades/maintenance. It used to change even less.
  - throwaway3b03 5y ago
    I used to have that. Then all residential customers were put under a CGN, and you can ask for a dedicated, public IP, free of charge. I imagine 99.9% of users can't tell the difference so the ISP saved a lot of IP space, while customers are just as happy.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  That makes me realise there is an incentive for ISPs to hold out on supporting IPv6. If IPv6 was widely supported then their IPv4 blocks would be worthless. I wonder how many will be holding out on deploying IPv6 until they can offload their still-valuable IPv4 addresses.
  - littlecranky67 5y ago
    IPv6 adoption is just sad. Sharing an anectode: Back in 2002, I was using a 56k modem on a linux box 24/7 from home with a dialup flatrate. Being an avid IRCnet user, I setup an IPv6 tunnel with a tunnel broker (I think it was Hurricane Electric - it was before Aiccu was a thing) and connected to the IPv6 IRCnet servers. There was once a channel #uptime which was a contest: On start of contest, everybody in channel got voice - and the person to last hold voice would win (you lose voice when your TCP connection disconnects). Even so I had a forced disconnect every 24h, amongst over 100 users (mostly Servers, Bouncers, Universities etc.) I ranked 6th place in the end (after couple of weeks), because my ipv4 dialup was reconnecting fast enough to receive the buffered ipv6 tunnel pakets from the broker. Today I have no more IPv6 since SIXXS shut its doors a couple of years back, and my provider (o2/Telefonica) hasn't roled it out to me yet. Looking back those 19 years, the availability and state of IPv6 has worsened for me - even though IPv4 shortage was known back then.
    - wvh 5y ago
      Same story here. I think I had IPv6 around 2000 with HE and then SIXXS, and my university back then already assigned IPv6 addresses. Now in 2021, I don't think I have had an IPv6 address assigned either at home or at work for quite some time. It's hard to understand why they don't just push through since there clearly are no real technical problems as witness by those few countries with major providers that actually actively use IPv6 (only).
hamburgerwah 5y ago
Having just realized my internet provider, cox, does not actually support ipv6 for the 2 million plus subscribers in my state I think it is safe to say that ipv6 is dead and will never take the place of ipv4 in our lifetimes. Don't get me wrong. They say they support it, they have lots of PR that says the support it but in fact as a subscriber they do not.
- deadmutex 5y ago
  Ehn, I don't know if you can go from "my internet provider, cox, does not actually support ipv6" to "I think it is safe to say that ipv6 is dead". There are much more comprehensive ways to look at ipv6 adoption, e.g. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- BikiniPrince 5y ago
  Mine had some beta program years ago. You had to find a number to call which was hidden away in a locked filing cabinet hidden away in a disused lavatory. They were purchased recently and maybe there is hope now.
- lashloch 5y ago
  in our lifetimes. you don't think ipv6 will overtake ipv4 in the next 50-odd years? think about the year 1971 and what was thought possible then
  - skuhn 5y ago
    Overtake: yes. The ability to launch a public-facing, commercial service and pretend like IPv4 never existed and you don't have to worry about it at all? Probably not within our lifetimes.
    - cm2187 5y ago
      I am not sure about that. When IPv6 support nears 95%, the pressure will be on those few ISPs to give access to those areas inaccessible from v4. Think of all these websites that need to be cheap and are happy enough with reaching 95% of the audience: blogs, small businesses, anything education related, etc. That should help going from 95 to 100.
skuhn 5y ago
Public auctions (which they didn't use) are currently in the $45-50 per IP ballpark. At that price it's $247.5 million worth of IPs. At auction the larger networks tend to go for less money per IP since there is a smaller market of people who want and can buy them (you have to be approved by ARIN/RIPE/etc. for the allocation size), which drives the price down.
- korethr 5y ago
  What's the cutoff for larger networks where the price starts to go down? Would say, a /16 count? Or does that effect kick in as low as, say, a /20?
  - skuhn 5y ago
    I think that it starts to have downward pressure at /22 to /20. You can see Hilco's historicals at [1]. Not all purchases are done in public though. It seems to me like an arbitrage opportunity, since /24 and /23 networks have many more potential buyers. But you have to be approved with a regional registry for the amount of space in order to buy it. Observing things from the buy side, I suspect that IP space is being brought to auction in a slow but steady trickle so as to maintain upward momentum on prices. The price has approximately doubled in the last year. [1] https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales
    - oarsinsync 5y ago
      > But you have to be approved with a regional registry for the amount of space in order to buy it. This hasn’t been my experience in RIPEland since post IPv4-exhaustion. Is this an ARINism?
      - skuhn 5y ago
        That's my understanding with ARIN, yeah.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  That’s not actually too expensive, considering they make that money back in a few months if all those IP’s are hosting even their smallest server.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Yeah I would like the FTC go after new IPv4 deployments / mandate dual stack on anti-trust grounds.
- korethr 5y ago
  That's an interesting idea. I don't know if the FTC has the authority to do so under the current powers given to it by Congress, and I don't know if I'd like the precedent of them trying without Congress so delegating that power. I'd be totally willing to discuss Congress delegating them said authority.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  How does IPv4's use translate to anti-trust?
  - usr1106 5y ago
    Controlling 200 times more of a critical resource than the next competitor does not sound like healthy competition.
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      That's if you can define IPV4 as a critical resource. But because anyone can assign any IPv4 address to anything and advertise it with BGP, it can't fit the definition of that.
      - remram 5y ago
        There would be penalties for that, maybe even legal ones. How easy it is to steal does not really factor in whether it's a critical resource.
        netr0ute 5y ago
        Can it be defined as property? I could make a Internet The Second using isolated networks and advertise whatever I wanted. It's not like digital movies and music where it's defined as property under copyright law because it's a creative work.
StreamBright 5y ago
IPv6 is trying to do too much in my opinion. This is partially why adoption is slower than it could be.
- kazen44 5y ago
  in what way? IPV6 is in many ways a simpeler protocol then IPv4. for instance, it has a significantly simpeler header then IPv4, it does not duplicate the broadcast behaviour of ethernet but relies on multicast instead. Some parts of IPv6 are complex (mainly, IPsec) but those are not required to get an operational ipv6 network. SLAAC & NDP are both significantly more simple then ARP and Automatic addressing under ipv4.
wu_187 5y ago
I've worked in the cloud hosting industry for a decade and a half. The entire time, we were warned about the IPv4 shortage and how we needed to switch to IPv6 soon(tm). Well, things haven't changed. Everyone is dragging their feet on IPv6 adoption from hosting providers, ISPs, hardware manufacturers, and software developers. I predicted this years ago and always said that it would require a government mandate to move on from IPv4. I honestly believe we are going to ramp up NAT in the coming years before really doing away with IPv4.
- xvilka 5y ago
  Some countries did exactly that, China for example. Most of the infrastructure, ISP networks, even user applications here is now IPv6 or ought to be in a few years [1]. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/china_single_stack_ipv6_notice/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/china_single_stack_ip...
  - toxik 5y ago
    To be fair, this is exactly the type of thing you’d expect China to be good at, unilateral decision making.
    - syntheticnature 5y ago
      Also, when your country's population is such that the entire IPv4 address space could only allow three addresses per resident, with that ignoring all reserved / multicast restrictions...
    - vmception 5y ago
      Benevolent leader is the best case of government, it is just improbable and of course it is too risky for any dissenter, and the successor is never as good. So people go for inclusive forms of government, which produces average case results more often.
- nousermane 5y ago
  NAT is ramping up on client side. Many home-internet connections are now NATted twice - in CPE, then again in CGN. On the server side, in contrast, NAT is winding down. 15 years ago, it was common to have either DMZ-style NAT, or on AWS you had to have NAT (they call it EIP). Nowadays, having a CDN or could-native load-balancer in front of your server is increasingly common. And behind those, that server just don't need a public IP (maybe only a shared outboud NAT for OS updates). That is - if you have a server at all (and not moved to lambda, S3, etc...)
liveoneggs 5y ago
ietf and friends could have made ipv6 only address the shortage but decided to change a bunch of other stuff too
goodpoint 5y ago
> are we in danger of the cloud providers effectively being the Internet? Between cloudflare and AWS/Azure/Google most of the Internet is an oligopoly right now. Interesting how nobody else replied to this part of your comment.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  Well, when the internet cartel pays your bills... Technology certainly scaling and improving but it's being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. In the past I could compete with most sophisticated companies, it wasn't unattainable. Barrier to entry is simply too high now. No single or small team of developers and technologists is going to compete with AWS.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    Wordpress?
koksik202 5y ago
I wonder if we see large use of IPv4 and IPv6 adaptation how tricky it will be to adapt and be able to have enough FIB in boxes to hold all those resolutions I wonder how many companies will go into buying beefy chassis rather than implementing some some low level fragmentation for two families
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
IcePic 5y ago
Of course that is how it will end. Noone thinks that this is a bad idea, to only allow customers of those three to host a service, because that is the current mindset. When they own all the v4 ips, we will have no choice but to hot on their infra or not host at all. At that time, someone might think that IPv6 with all its faults might have been a good idea after all, but then it will be too late, since "v4 seems to work, all clients behind 2-3-4 layers of NAT, everything tunneled in HTTP/4.5 on a single port outwards to your VPS/VPN". Not being able to host a game on your home computer, not being able to start a service unless GCP/Azure/AWS allows you to will be the end of the internet as we used to know it. Extra fun for anyone not being american enough to want to be a customer of the big three.
- sigstoat 5y ago
  > When they own all the v4 ips ... there won't be any value in them any more. if the only folks left who can use IPv4 are the hosting providers ("big three" or not), then nobody will be using using IPv4 to contact all the hosted services. large swaths of users have IPv6 available to them. if there starts being some inconvenience to not having 6, we can be sure adoption will pick up even faster. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
  - IcePic 5y ago
    >> When they own all the v4 ips >... there won't be any value in them any more. and upto that point, it will be SUPER expensive for you to try to get one (or 256), which they can pay since they have monopoly on them, and you only needing one can't.

Ambroos 5y ago

I guess there's a large pool of IP addresses used by residential ISPs that could be recycled relatively easily. When I lived in Ireland I only got a public IPv6, my IPv4 was behind CG-NAT. The nerd in me wasn't a fan of that on paper, but in reality I didn't have any issues with it. I could see ISPs making a quick buck by switching to CG-NAT on IPv4 so they can sell off their IPv4 blocks. Those IPs being recycled for servers/services doesn't seem too risky, given that they're not typically hosting anything.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago
I find the ipv6 address scary because IP geolocation gives that in the same city district. Cgnat would be better because the server would see ipv4 of the ISP. I don't know, is there a way to not show my ipv6 and fall back on cgnat address because that looks much more secure in terms of not getting doxed and ad tracked.
- andruby 5y ago
  I assume a vpn, ssh tunnel, wireguard or any other type of proxy would hide your residential ip.
- sp332 5y ago
  Sure, just disable IPv6 support in your OS.
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    apparently android doesnt allow that on wifi so out of luck.
- tolien 5y ago
  That’s not inherent to IPv6 though, your ISP chose to be more specific in the location data for those addresses. If it’s sufficiently detailed as to “dox” you, maybe ask them not to do that?
  - wu_187 5y ago
    Both AT&T and Comcast do this with IPv4 as well.
    - tolien 5y ago
      Yeah, NTL/Virgin Media in the UK do the same in that their IPs geolocate to where the node/head end is. In a city, it's not going to be specific enough to uniquely identify you but it's still weird seeing ads that aren't that far away. On the other hand, the IPv4/v6 addresses on my A&A connection geolocate to either London or Bracknell (where their office is), about 400 miles away. I get a lot of pointless ads for things in Surrey that I have no intention of visiting.
      - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
        i have never used google search but the other day someone used that infront of me and on the bottom i saw what appeared to be "pin code for approximating your current location for local results" and something to that end. that scared me big time because this was like my home pin code, my small city has like 30 so this is narrowing me down to a single one which i am not comfortable with
        tolien 5y ago
        Right, but is Google doing this with the information they get from your IP address or something else entirely? Is it just coincidence that your IP address corresponds to your ISP’s office which happens to be relatively local? With loose enough permissions your browser has a geolocation API that, depending on your device, will be a hell of a lot more accurate (if you have Wi-Fi hardware it can use that to work out where it is relative to the known locations of the SSIDs it can see, or straight-out use GPS). None of this has anything to do with IPv6 - you give away some location information with your username and profile on this very site, for example.
JPDeckers 5y ago
Problem with CGNAT is the costs involved in bookkeeping for law enforcement. Where an IPv4 solution for your clients only needs change-logging on IPbinding-to-client level, the CG-NAT requires you as an ISP to log every outgoing IPv4/port combination with timestamp to client mapping. Which requires A LOT more storage and much more expensive equipment. Going rate per IPv4 is up to $40 nowadays, selling of your v4 block might not be cost-efficient.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- minimaster 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I work with this stuff and might be a little biased to certain vendor solutions. A good CGNAT implementations have support for static blocks: the subscriber always ends up a a specific ipnumber+portblock combination. (Each subscriber is assigned a specific number of exit ports and this all just logged once during startup so you always know where each subscriber ends up). Should they run out of their assigned portblock, there are pools which you can borrow from (these need then to be logged who borrowed at what time etc). So all in all there is less logging than when everything was dynamic.
  - endre 5y ago
    And law enforcement inquiries barely contain source port information, or precise time. Most of then go like: who had this IP in $this-two-weeks-window. No source port, no destination IP/port.
    - philderbeast 5y ago
      that will just lead to a whole lot of "we dont have that information" or alternativly, "all of these 10000 people used that, have fun!"
      - floatboth 5y ago
        And isn't that the privacy we all would really enjoy? :D
einpoklum 5y ago
> WThe nerd in me wasn't a fan of that on paper, but in reality I didn't have any issues with it. No issues? So, how are people supposed to be able to access your machine then?
- tehbeard 5y ago
  Why should I want people to be accessing my personal desktop/laptop/tablet?
  - edoceo 5y ago
    It's cause you want to get to your home boxen from outside.
    - dbmnt 5y ago
      There are other solutions to this problem now. Tailscale comes to mind.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Surely you know this is a super niche requirement? You can use IP6 or a commercial rather than domestic ISP if you really need to do it.
      - olyjohn 5y ago
        It might not be so niche if we weren't all behind NAT firewalls. There would probably be a whole lot more applications that do direct connections between two people, and eliminate the middle-man. There's a reason every major service out there has their applications set up in some cloud to relay the messages back and forth between clients.
    - sp332 5y ago
      That was not the question, it said "people".
- sp332 5y ago
dehrmann 5y ago
I've had a static ipv4 address on a home internet connection for almost 10 years, now. They're out there...
- phatfish 5y ago
  Yup, ISPs in countries that got a nice big block if addresses in the early days can still manage this. I have a cable connection that was originally provided by NTL (now Virgin Media). My IPv4 address changes about once a year now as they do upgrades/maintenance. It used to change even less.
- throwaway3b03 5y ago
  I used to have that. Then all residential customers were put under a CGN, and you can ask for a dedicated, public IP, free of charge. I imagine 99.9% of users can't tell the difference so the ISP saved a lot of IP space, while customers are just as happy.
globular-toast 5y ago
That makes me realise there is an incentive for ISPs to hold out on supporting IPv6. If IPv6 was widely supported then their IPv4 blocks would be worthless. I wonder how many will be holding out on deploying IPv6 until they can offload their still-valuable IPv4 addresses.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  IPv6 adoption is just sad. Sharing an anectode: Back in 2002, I was using a 56k modem on a linux box 24/7 from home with a dialup flatrate. Being an avid IRCnet user, I setup an IPv6 tunnel with a tunnel broker (I think it was Hurricane Electric - it was before Aiccu was a thing) and connected to the IPv6 IRCnet servers. There was once a channel #uptime which was a contest: On start of contest, everybody in channel got voice - and the person to last hold voice would win (you lose voice when your TCP connection disconnects). Even so I had a forced disconnect every 24h, amongst over 100 users (mostly Servers, Bouncers, Universities etc.) I ranked 6th place in the end (after couple of weeks), because my ipv4 dialup was reconnecting fast enough to receive the buffered ipv6 tunnel pakets from the broker. Today I have no more IPv6 since SIXXS shut its doors a couple of years back, and my provider (o2/Telefonica) hasn't roled it out to me yet. Looking back those 19 years, the availability and state of IPv6 has worsened for me - even though IPv4 shortage was known back then.
  - wvh 5y ago
    Same story here. I think I had IPv6 around 2000 with HE and then SIXXS, and my university back then already assigned IPv6 addresses. Now in 2021, I don't think I have had an IPv6 address assigned either at home or at work for quite some time. It's hard to understand why they don't just push through since there clearly are no real technical problems as witness by those few countries with major providers that actually actively use IPv6 (only).

hamburgerwah 5y ago

Having just realized my internet provider, cox, does not actually support ipv6 for the 2 million plus subscribers in my state I think it is safe to say that ipv6 is dead and will never take the place of ipv4 in our lifetimes. Don't get me wrong. They say they support it, they have lots of PR that says the support it but in fact as a subscriber they do not.

deadmutex 5y ago
Ehn, I don't know if you can go from "my internet provider, cox, does not actually support ipv6" to "I think it is safe to say that ipv6 is dead". There are much more comprehensive ways to look at ipv6 adoption, e.g. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
BikiniPrince 5y ago
Mine had some beta program years ago. You had to find a number to call which was hidden away in a locked filing cabinet hidden away in a disused lavatory. They were purchased recently and maybe there is hope now.
lashloch 5y ago
in our lifetimes. you don't think ipv6 will overtake ipv4 in the next 50-odd years? think about the year 1971 and what was thought possible then
- skuhn 5y ago
  Overtake: yes. The ability to launch a public-facing, commercial service and pretend like IPv4 never existed and you don't have to worry about it at all? Probably not within our lifetimes.
  - cm2187 5y ago
    I am not sure about that. When IPv6 support nears 95%, the pressure will be on those few ISPs to give access to those areas inaccessible from v4. Think of all these websites that need to be cheap and are happy enough with reaching 95% of the audience: blogs, small businesses, anything education related, etc. That should help going from 95 to 100.

skuhn 5y ago

Public auctions (which they didn't use) are currently in the $45-50 per IP ballpark. At that price it's $247.5 million worth of IPs. At auction the larger networks tend to go for less money per IP since there is a smaller market of people who want and can buy them (you have to be approved by ARIN/RIPE/etc. for the allocation size), which drives the price down.

korethr 5y ago
What's the cutoff for larger networks where the price starts to go down? Would say, a /16 count? Or does that effect kick in as low as, say, a /20?
- skuhn 5y ago
  I think that it starts to have downward pressure at /22 to /20. You can see Hilco's historicals at [1]. Not all purchases are done in public though. It seems to me like an arbitrage opportunity, since /24 and /23 networks have many more potential buyers. But you have to be approved with a regional registry for the amount of space in order to buy it. Observing things from the buy side, I suspect that IP space is being brought to auction in a slow but steady trickle so as to maintain upward momentum on prices. The price has approximately doubled in the last year. [1] https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    > But you have to be approved with a regional registry for the amount of space in order to buy it. This hasn’t been my experience in RIPEland since post IPv4-exhaustion. Is this an ARINism?
    - skuhn 5y ago
      That's my understanding with ARIN, yeah.
Aeolun 5y ago
That’s not actually too expensive, considering they make that money back in a few months if all those IP’s are hosting even their smallest server.

Ericson2314 5y ago

Yeah I would like the FTC go after new IPv4 deployments / mandate dual stack on anti-trust grounds.

korethr 5y ago
That's an interesting idea. I don't know if the FTC has the authority to do so under the current powers given to it by Congress, and I don't know if I'd like the precedent of them trying without Congress so delegating that power. I'd be totally willing to discuss Congress delegating them said authority.
IncRnd 5y ago
How does IPv4's use translate to anti-trust?
- usr1106 5y ago
  Controlling 200 times more of a critical resource than the next competitor does not sound like healthy competition.
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    That's if you can define IPV4 as a critical resource. But because anyone can assign any IPv4 address to anything and advertise it with BGP, it can't fit the definition of that.
    - remram 5y ago
      There would be penalties for that, maybe even legal ones. How easy it is to steal does not really factor in whether it's a critical resource.
      - netr0ute 5y ago
        Can it be defined as property? I could make a Internet The Second using isolated networks and advertise whatever I wanted. It's not like digital movies and music where it's defined as property under copyright law because it's a creative work.

StreamBright 5y ago

IPv6 is trying to do too much in my opinion. This is partially why adoption is slower than it could be.

kazen44 5y ago
in what way? IPV6 is in many ways a simpeler protocol then IPv4. for instance, it has a significantly simpeler header then IPv4, it does not duplicate the broadcast behaviour of ethernet but relies on multicast instead. Some parts of IPv6 are complex (mainly, IPsec) but those are not required to get an operational ipv6 network. SLAAC & NDP are both significantly more simple then ARP and Automatic addressing under ipv4.

wu_187 5y ago

I've worked in the cloud hosting industry for a decade and a half. The entire time, we were warned about the IPv4 shortage and how we needed to switch to IPv6 soon(tm). Well, things haven't changed. Everyone is dragging their feet on IPv6 adoption from hosting providers, ISPs, hardware manufacturers, and software developers. I predicted this years ago and always said that it would require a government mandate to move on from IPv4. I honestly believe we are going to ramp up NAT in the coming years before really doing away with IPv4.

xvilka 5y ago
Some countries did exactly that, China for example. Most of the infrastructure, ISP networks, even user applications here is now IPv6 or ought to be in a few years [1]. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/china_single_stack_ipv6_notice/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/china_single_stack_ip...
- toxik 5y ago
  To be fair, this is exactly the type of thing you’d expect China to be good at, unilateral decision making.
  - syntheticnature 5y ago
    Also, when your country's population is such that the entire IPv4 address space could only allow three addresses per resident, with that ignoring all reserved / multicast restrictions...
  - vmception 5y ago
    Benevolent leader is the best case of government, it is just improbable and of course it is too risky for any dissenter, and the successor is never as good. So people go for inclusive forms of government, which produces average case results more often.
nousermane 5y ago
NAT is ramping up on client side. Many home-internet connections are now NATted twice - in CPE, then again in CGN. On the server side, in contrast, NAT is winding down. 15 years ago, it was common to have either DMZ-style NAT, or on AWS you had to have NAT (they call it EIP). Nowadays, having a CDN or could-native load-balancer in front of your server is increasingly common. And behind those, that server just don't need a public IP (maybe only a shared outboud NAT for OS updates). That is - if you have a server at all (and not moved to lambda, S3, etc...)

liveoneggs 5y ago

ietf and friends could have made ipv6 only address the shortage but decided to change a bunch of other stuff too

goodpoint 5y ago

> are we in danger of the cloud providers effectively being the Internet? Between cloudflare and AWS/Azure/Google most of the Internet is an oligopoly right now. Interesting how nobody else replied to this part of your comment.

Frost1x 5y ago
Well, when the internet cartel pays your bills... Technology certainly scaling and improving but it's being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. In the past I could compete with most sophisticated companies, it wasn't unattainable. Barrier to entry is simply too high now. No single or small team of developers and technologists is going to compete with AWS.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  Wordpress?

koksik202 5y ago

I wonder if we see large use of IPv4 and IPv6 adaptation how tricky it will be to adapt and be able to have enough FIB in boxes to hold all those resolutions I wonder how many companies will go into buying beefy chassis rather than implementing some some low level fragmentation for two families

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

IcePic 5y ago

Of course that is how it will end. Noone thinks that this is a bad idea, to only allow customers of those three to host a service, because that is the current mindset. When they own all the v4 ips, we will have no choice but to hot on their infra or not host at all. At that time, someone might think that IPv6 with all its faults might have been a good idea after all, but then it will be too late, since "v4 seems to work, all clients behind 2-3-4 layers of NAT, everything tunneled in HTTP/4.5 on a single port outwards to your VPS/VPN". Not being able to host a game on your home computer, not being able to start a service unless GCP/Azure/AWS allows you to will be the end of the internet as we used to know it. Extra fun for anyone not being american enough to want to be a customer of the big three.

sigstoat 5y ago
> When they own all the v4 ips ... there won't be any value in them any more. if the only folks left who can use IPv4 are the hosting providers ("big three" or not), then nobody will be using using IPv4 to contact all the hosted services. large swaths of users have IPv6 available to them. if there starts being some inconvenience to not having 6, we can be sure adoption will pick up even faster. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- IcePic 5y ago
  >> When they own all the v4 ips >... there won't be any value in them any more. and upto that point, it will be SUPER expensive for you to try to get one (or 256), which they can pay since they have monopoly on them, and you only needing one can't.