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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
- mbgerring 3y agoWe should probably consider whether the rent-seeking enabled by the scarcity of IPV4 addresses is one of the things holding back IPV6 adoption.
- jasekt 3y agoEU have enough influence to do to IPV6 what it did to USB in iPhones.
- Sebguer 3y agoIt's harder to prove consumer harm with something as abstract as IP addresses, and there's a bunch of other pieces that make this much less unlikely, such as the fact that USBs already become obsolete and need to be replaced, so you're just shifting the replacement cycle.
- irdc 3y agoWith all those addresses locked up at the hyperscalers IPv4 has become anticompetitive. So yes, the EU can prove consumer harm.
- nonethewiser 3y agoThey don’t need to prove consumer harm to pass laws.
- jjeaff 3y agoexactly. US anti-trust requires you prove harm to the consumer. In the EU, anti-competitive behavior is enough.
- SamuelAdams 3y agoActually the US gov’t adopted a policy last November to migrate all services to ipv6 by 2025. So the USA might have some weight in the migration. https://www.ferc.gov/internet-protocol-version-6-ipv6-policy https://www.ferc.gov/internet-protocol-version-6-ipv6-policy
- sambazi 3y agoyou mean the fact that amazon has around 4.5B reasons to not support ipv6? interesting idea
- quaintdev 3y agoSooner or later any sort of monopoly leads to abuse of power and loss of foresight of greater good.
- MiscIdeaMaker99 3y agoAWS supports IPv6. https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ipv6/ https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ipv6/
- baby_souffle 3y agoKinda. 2/3 of their internal services don’t. You can do ipv6 only vpc but not if you wanted to use rds or ecr or …
- sambazi 3y agomore like 90% according to https://awsipv6.neveragain.de/ https://awsipv6.neveragain.de/
- contravariant 3y agoIt should be driving adoption if the capitalists are to be believed. Make of that what you will.
- atyvr 3y agocorrect, direct url is https://toonk.io/aws-ipv4-estate-now-worth-4-5-billion/index.html https://toonk.io/aws-ipv4-estate-now-worth-4-5-billion/index... More interestingly, perhaps, is a forward look at how much new revenue AWS will generate once AWS starts charging ($44 per IP per year) as of 2024. I think it's not unlikely that AWS will generate a few hundred million to a billion in additional revenue with this new charge.
- dopa42365 3y agoHetzner charges 2€ per month or so for a v4 address already (optional of course).
- kro 3y agoThat is for dedicated servers and additional IPs. The first on a VPS is 0,60€
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cdchn 3y agoI suppose a sufficiently motivated individual could look at something like Shodan, see how many of those IP addresses AWS owns are active (and fudge it by some factor to account for how many of those IP addresses are used by AWS themselves) and multiply it by their new IP address billing.
- sah2ed 3y agoNo need to use Shodan. AWS already publishes the IPv4 address it owns in JSON from a well-known endpoint [0]. [0]: https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
- cdchn 3y agoAWS does not publish what IPs are active and assigned IE: customers are paying for vs. addresses they own.
- andromaton 3y agoWhich divided by approximately 3.7 billion routeable addresses works out to about $1/address.
- jonhohle 3y ago3.7B would be all routable IPv4 addresses. As the article points out, AWS only owns 127M routable addresses.
- andromaton 3y agoIndeed.
- Gigachad 3y agoHopefully hosting providers putting an actual price on v4 usage will be the push that gets things rolling to v6.
- azlev 3y agoI don't like this solution because it will cost me money and time to setup myself a modem that can handle properly ipv6 or switch to a more expensive provider. Send the bill to end users is not what should be done. All this ipv6 endeavour already cost me a lot of time learning and troubleshooting software, and sometimes realizing that some modems doesn't have a good ipv6 stack and the best solution is to turn it off.
- ianburrell 3y agoCharging for IPv4 is mostly going to affect hosting providers. Until recently, AWS users were charged nothing for public IP so there was no incentive to conserve. The price for IP for connections is already builtin to the price. Also, ISPs just use CGNAT to share IPs with multiple customers when they are short, It makes sense to charge more for static IP. How long ago did you do try IPv6? These days it should just work. If your router doesn’t work, get a better router since it is broken.
- preisschild 3y agoBlame your ISP. IPv6 should have already been supported since the 2000s.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoThen there are a lot of ISPs to blame: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- Gigachad 3y agoBy that chart, the IPv6 rollout will be basically complete by 2030. I suspect it will speed up near the end though as the first few services start to go V6 only.
- unethical_ban 3y agoWhat's the thought on Amazon stock price? Is their dominance of the web built in to their price or does it have room for significant growth in the next 5-10 years?
- Narkov 3y agoA subtle detail from the article is that address prices peaked in 2021 at $60 and has steadily decreased to $35. Where does it go from here? Is this a proxy for the tech correction?
- atyvr 3y agoYah, it certainly seems like maybe that was peak pricing. This write up has some more data on historical pricing https://www.ipxo.com/blog/ipv4-price-history/ https://www.ipxo.com/blog/ipv4-price-history/ I've also heard folks pay quite a bit over the average price for novelty IP addresses, so perhaps that skewed the data? I'd love to be able to buy 2.2.2.0/23 or my favorite 42.42.42.0/24
- 015a 3y agoYeah, one example is Cloudflare and 1.1.1.1; though the story behind that is less about money and far more interesting. Apparently, APNIC had owned 1.1.1.1 for, basically, forever, but were never able to actually use it for anything because it caught so much garbage traffic. Cloudflare is one of only a handful of service providers that could announce the IP and handle the traffic; so in exchange for helping APNIC's research group sort through the trash traffic, Cloudflare hosts their DNS resolver there. https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/
- Something1234 3y agoI would really like to see the results of this research to understand what is going on there.
- throw0101b 3y agoIPv6 Excuse Bingo: * https://ipv6bingo.com https://ipv6bingo.com
- atyvr 3y agoI thought this one is interesting too https://awsipv6.neveragain.de/ https://awsipv6.neveragain.de/
- jedberg 3y agoI don't run IPv6 on my home network. I try it about once a year, enabling it at the router (it's already enabled on my laptop). And then random stuff just doesn't work. Various websites hang, various widgets just don't load, etc. Then I turn it off and everything gets better again. I'be been too lazy to diagnose why exactly it doesn't work, I just figure it's easier to run with it off. At some point a website I really want to access will require IPv6. Hopefully by then whatever is broken will be fixed.
- throw0101b 3y ago> And then random stuff just doesn't work. Various websites hang, various widgets just don't load, etc. Then I turn it off and everything gets better again. Before I switched ISPs a few weeks ago to one without IPv6, I was with an ISP with IPv6 (dual-stack) for about five years and had zero problems. In fact it worked 'too well' initially: when I was still IPv4-only I had put a bunch of Facebook domains in my iMac's /etc/hosts file pointing to 127.0.0.1 so that all those little icons would stop loading. At some point I noticed they were back. After some head scratching over a day or so I realized that Facebook was IPv6-enabled, and so the icons were loading because AAAA records were working. Adding ::1 for Facebook in hosts fixed things.
- midasuni 3y agoOne of the security issues with dual stack. Your attack surface is twice the size, and human error means you are more vulnerable. Still unsure of the benefit of dual stack, but there are numerous costs.
- j_thirkle 3y agoIs it possible that someone could start some kind of IPv4 ETF? Would be interesting to see - call it the Web 1.0 ETF.
- scrps 3y agoTurning a critical peice of internet infrastructure into a financial toy for wall st would be a bit akin to taking all the physical barriers to access off of the nuclear football, authenticating it, and leaving it in a room full of bored children. Don't do that.
- greyface- 3y agoRIRs oversee all IP ownership changes, and will generally not approve them unless they satisfy a documented technical need. So far, this has (mostly) prevented people from financializing IPv4.
- yla92 3y agoSome noob questions here. How does one buy a block of IPv4 as an individual? (If that's allowed) After you purchase it, how does it come into your possession? How do you utilize them?
- TheHappyOddish 3y agoSpeak to the local RIR[1]. They have varying requirements, but broadly you generally need to justify your use case, multi-home (for your own AS) and pay a yearly membership fee. After that, you need to speak to your ISP about either advertising it or peering with you - or going dark fibre if you're a real masochist. Good luck, update us if you do it! 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry
- x86x87 3y agoYeah usually you won't be able to buy one if you don't have your own AS
- TheHappyOddish 3y agoIn my area, the AS is usually provided 'free' with your membership.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- candiddevmike 3y ago1. You most likely can't. You typically need to prove to a numbering authority that you need that many IPs (minimum /24) for X reason and you will be multihomed (connected to two+ ISPs) by Y date. 2. You are assigned a BGP Autonomous System Number (ASN) as part of the process. The IPs are assigned to your ASN. 3. You sign a peering contract with ISPs and peer with them using BGP on your router. You use your ASN to announce your block to have traffic routed to/from your router. One of the tragedies of IPv6, IMO, is not having a better/streamlined process for end users to get allocations without all the red tape. There's tons of space, let's pretend it's the 90s and give away IP blocks to whoever asks. Either require ISPs to give static allocations or make it easier for getting a personal block. No, prefix delegation is not good enough.
- tamrix 3y agoI can promise you no one is paying $35 per IPv4 address.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoPeople who need them on short notice often pay more. The rent AWS collects on their IPv4s also pays that off in a year, I think.
- qingcharles 3y agoHow much does Amazon charge? I pay about 50 Euro cents a month to Hetzner for mine. I've tried running web servers as pure IPv6 plays, which I would happily, happily prefer. It is just not possible. Even things I'm convinced will work, like cellphones, which are mostly IPv6 these days, won't connect.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoAWS charges $0.005 per IP per hour. Multiplied by 8760 hours, you get about $44/year at 100% utilization.
- skuhn 3y agohttps://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales $30-35 is the low end per IPv4 address over the last year.
- atyvr 3y agoi disagree. skuhn posted a link to some historical data https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales Based on data from the IPv4 brokerage ipv4.global, the cost of IPv4 addresses has seen a notable increase. In 2014, the price ranged from $6 to $24 per IP, depending on the size of the subnet. By 2021, this range had jumped to between $23 and $60 per IP. The fluctuation between the lowest and highest sales prices for each IPv4 address remained relatively stable until 2021, when we began to see more significant spikes. The peak prices for IPv4 addresses in 2021 were observed in September and October. During these months, IP addresses allocated by RIPE NCC and ARIN fetched as much as $60 each. Specifically, a /24 block from RIPE NCC sold for $15,360, while ARIN's /22 and /23 blocks went for $61,440 and $30,720, respectively. Fast forward to October 2022, and the highest sale of the year was recorded: IP addresses allocated by ARIN sold for $60.70 each, or $15,540 for a complete /24 block. Despite these peaks, the IPv4 market appears to have reached a more stable pricing structure, especially when compared to the more volatile price shifts seen in 2021.
- petarb 3y agoCan someone please ELI5?
- jldugger 3y agoAnyone who wants to put a computer on the internet needs a phone number. There are now more computers than phone numbers, especially old ones without an area code or country code. As a result, those numbers are bought and sold, and amazon now owns 4.5 billion dollars worth of them.
- qingcharles 3y agoThe Internet is built on what is called version 4 of Internet Protocol, which when they designed it allotted 4Bn total IP addresses. Each device on the Internet would be able to have one IP and 4Bn would be more than enough for the whole of Planet Earth. Fast forward a couple of decades and everyone needs 10 IPs each. You have your phone, your laptop, your work computer, your TV, your door lock, your door bell camera, your thermostat, etc. And every web site in the world traditionally needed its own IP. And so the world pretty much ran out of those 4Bn addresses. The "Powers That Be" developed IPv6 which solves this, but not everything works properly yet when connecting with IPv6, so if you want to make sure your software/hardware is guaranteed to connect to everything then you need one of those precious IPv4 addresses. Now, in the early days of the Internet there were so many addresses that they were handed out like Halloween candy. And many people had so many they didn't even use a fraction of them. So now you can make good money selling your old addresses as they are prime real estate.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago> Fast forward a couple of decades and everyone needs 10 IPs each. You have your phone, your laptop, your work computer, your TV, your door lock, your door bell camera, your thermostat, etc. Your phone perhaps, but the rest of these devices never need a public IP address.
- pcthrowaway 3y agoYour phone never needs (nor gets) a public IP either. Pretty much every cell network gives the phone an IP on the subnet, and then uses NAT, or CG-NAT[1] to share the same public IPs for multiple mobile devices. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
- nfRfqX5n 3y agoExtremely surprised that I could load that massive json list of ips on my phone instantly
- Marvy_a 3y agoOut of interest, I opened link with this json file and scrolled till the end of it on a very cheap Android tablet from 2012 with Allwinner A10 (One 1GHz core) and 512mb of RAM, using lightweight Via browser without much trouble.
- frutiger 3y agoI agree. But in some sense it’s even more wonderful that your phone can (probably) render 1080p60 video without skipping a beat. Not to mention that it is transmitted over thin air, originating from someone (probably) thousands of miles away. And even more wonderful is that no one thinks of it as anything special, at all.
- leoh 3y agofwiw, ATT charges me $15 for ~8 fixed ipv4 addresses on my gigabit plan. Even if we amortize against the total monthly bill of $113, we get ~$15 per IP. EDIT: I guess this is the cost to _rent_ an IP per month and not the cost of _owning_ an IPv4 address.
- qingcharles 3y agoRight. I pay about 50 Euro cents per month for each of mine, so my provider gets about $10 a year let's say. Which means they'll pay for themselves in 3 years on average, after that it's all profit, assuming they are still useful. At some point. At SOME point, IPv6 will work in enough situations that we can ignore the small minority of situations where it doesn't. If even 90% of the visitors to my web sites could connect on IPv6 I would change tomorrow, but it just isn't that high yet.
- keep_reading 3y ago$30 for a /27 on ATT. Totally worth it.
- leoh 3y agoWhat do you use for?
- keep_reading 3y agoI have 5gbit fiber from ATT and self host all my services
- leoh 3y agoWhat sort of stuff do you do to make sure those are services hardened? And what kinds of services? I've been meaning to create such a setup, but am a bit concerned about vulnerabilities.
- LilBytes 3y agoMy ISP has one of the better options where you can permanently lease an IPv4 address for a deposit of $100 AUD. The lease is indefinite, and when you don't want it any more you get the $100 back.
- quickthrower2 3y agoWhat is the IP "ownership" model? is $35 to "own" the IP. What is the law around this (do companies contest who owns what IP)
- kxrm 3y agoIP blocks allocations are assets but they are granted by the RIR. [1] Your allocation is given to you in exchange for being a member of the RIR. You don't actually own the IPs, but you do have exclusive rights to them but the RIR can ultimately decide to revoke your rights to them for violating RIR policies. RIRs do allow you to transfer your IP blocks to other organizations but you can only do so if the receiving organization proves to the RIR they have a good reason to hold those blocks of IPs. This valuation is based on what a typical IPv4 owner receives in exchange for that transfer of IPv4 addresses. Just like any assets which you hold a lot of, if AWS dumped their IP addresses on the transfer market, the price of IPv4s would likely fall significantly so I doubt they could actually get that price for all their IPv4s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry
- wmf 3y agoThe precedent for this came from Nortel's bankruptcy where they sold IPs to Microsoft. Some tried to argue that Nortel should have given up the addresses for free but the court ruled that IPs are property.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoUpdate link to actual article link: https://toonk.io/aws-ipv4-estate-now-worth-4-5-billion/index.html https://toonk.io/aws-ipv4-estate-now-worth-4-5-billion/index...
- malikNF 3y agoQuestion for the networking folk here. How can the rest of us help move things over to ipv6?
- irrational 3y agoI’ve been hearing about ipv4 running out and the need to move to ipv6 for so many years/decades, but it keeps not happening. I’m wondering if anything will change in my lifetime.
- sambazi 3y agoipv6 is _the_ mobile and india internet, mostly. iphones are v6 only as are indian consumer connections.
- codetrotter 3y ago> iphones are v6 only Are you sure about this? Do you have a link with details? If I disconnect from WiFi and use the SIM card currently in my iPhone, and I go to one of the websites that tell me my public IPv4 and IPv6 address it shows that the mobile internet connection I have with this SIM card is IPv4 only. iPhone 14 Pro
- sambazi 3y agojust checked again on an iphone se, 1st-gen, ios 15.x on t-mobile reseller in germany: actually there is a v4 default route on the wwan-interface that appears to be a p2p link (192/32) probably to a cgnat. besides 127/8, there are a only v6 routes, a lot of them.
- SSLy 3y agohow do you check the routing table from the iphone? a jailbreak? some app?
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- bradley13 3y agoCan we go back in time and hit the designers of IPv6 upside the head? The decision not to make IPv6 backwards compatible, the belief that a beautiful new standard could magically replace something already so widespread... "Naive" is an inadequate word. We are still futzing with the transition 3 decades later, with no end in sight. Grrr, grumble...
- drchiu 3y agoEngineers/designers never assume their ideas aren’t as clever as it appears in their minds.
- welterde 3y agoYou have to go back further in time and hit the designers of IPv4 on the head for not making it forward compatible. IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint. You can embed IPv4 space within IPv6, there is NAT64, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 and many other transition technologies. It's not possible to design a protocol that is any more backwards-compatible.
- kristopolous 3y agoVint Cerf has called the decision of it being 32 bits as silly and arbitrary, like having a car odometer with 40 digits. If he had pushed for more, he thought nobody would have taken him seriously. The idea of 32 becoming scarce was laughable. Also the complaint about ipv6 isn't a technical one, it's a usability one. Extending it to 48 bits would have been easy enough for people - like international calling. Those 16 bits could be in hex, as a convention, so something like "(4EA7) 8.8.4.2". However, I've constantly heard that the 128 bit hexadecimal with colons just looks too complicated and inconvenient. You might be brilliant and find it easy but to a lot of people ipv6 addresses look like cryptographic hashes
- nash 3y agoOnly network engineers should see or care about IP addresses. The fact IPv6 addresses use colons is why people don't use IPv6 is the worst take I've ever heard.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoHere’s your new cryptocurrency, all hail IPv4Coin!
- anonymous344 3y agocan I buy one ipv4 for myself somehow. not lease or rent, buy ?
- 22c 3y agoLast I checked, the smallest blocks for sale are class C. I also don't think there are many places willing to announce your ultra specific route because it's not great for routing tables.
- RockRobotRock 3y agoI think a colo would be happy to announce your /24, wouldn't they?
- 22c 3y agoA /24 sure, but GP was asking about buying a single IP address.
- greyface- 3y ago> class C You can also acquire and use a /24 out of a class A or B block, thanks to this newfangled thing called CIDR. ;)
- 22c 3y agoEh sorry I meant a /24 not specifically a class C
- fanf2 3y agoNo, the minimum allocation is a /24 (for v4) or a /32 (for v6)
- erinnh 3y agoIts a /48 for IPv6. Thats what I have in my RIPE Account.
- epolanski 3y agoELI5, why are IPv4 addresses so precious?
- fastball 3y agoBecause there are only 4.3B of them possible, and we've not done the best job of migrating to IPv6. Said another way, AWS owns approximately 3% of all IPv4 addresses.
- epolanski 3y agoI understand that they are limited, but that doesn't explain why are they sought after? Essentially, how are they better than IPv6 addresses?
- Macha 3y agoOnly approximately 45% of clients support IPv6. Clients that don't support IPv6 can't talk to IPv6 servers. Depending on your target market, that might be as high as 70% (India, France) or as low as 0.2% (several african countries). Today most of these devices will have some form of IPv4 connectivity, though it's often through NAT, which is slower and problematic for P2P like games. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
- epolanski 3y agoThank you for the short but clear explanation.
- 22c 3y agoThe main reason is they "just work" and they're now a scarce resource. Having something that's addressable on the internet is trivial when you have a public IPv4 address.
- weeeeelp 3y agoThere is a finite amount of them - 2^32, some 4.3 billion - the limitation stems from using 32-bit values to express them. We cannot have more added, as the "capacity" of the 32-bit IP address value to provide different numbers has been exhausted by "assigning" these blocks of IP space - back in the old days of the Internet, large blocks of IP space were given to large organizations (such as Xerox mentioned in the article), now cloud hyperscalers are buying them back at a premium so their customers can use it to host things.
- hkt 3y agoWhat I'm taking from this: switch to IPv6 and you can do a little bit to devalue an asset held by AWS. Honestly, I've never had such a strong incentive.
- vaylian 3y agoGitHub.com still doesn't support IPv6. I know that there is some work going on to support it, but this shows that it is far from trivial.
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoIt's usually not a tehnical problem, but either a management or a budget problem.
- unsignednoop 3y ago[dead]
- jeroenhd 3y agoThis is one of the reasons why I'm trying to avoid Github these days. If they can't get something as simple as IPv6 to work, I don't have much faith in the test of their backend either.
- code_runner 3y agoSort of a weird take. I doubt if the people responsible for testing their backend have ever even met the people who would migrate to ipv6
- jeroenhd 3y agoThere's plenty of attention on the Github meta issue about the lack of IPv6 (https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539) so anyone who even glances at customer requests should be aware of the issue at the very least. They also did offer IPv6 availability for a short while as a test, but that was quickly shut down, so there is probably a technical issues they can't figure out or they would've kept the trial system running for longer. Either way, Github isn't communicating, so it's hard to tell if this is indifference or incompetence. As an end user, the distinction doesn't really matter.
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- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xvilka 3y agoIPv4 is the new Bitcoin.
- brodouevencode 3y agoDoes the cost of migrating to IPv6 exceed the cost of buying up large swaths of IPv4 addresses?
- dredmorbius 3y agoIPv4 address space was the actual bitcoin...