alt Hacker NewsIP Addresses Through 2025
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This closes on a bit of a downer:
"As the Internet continues to evolve, it is no longer the technically innovative challenger pitted against venerable incumbents in the forms of the traditional industries of telephony, print newspapers, television entertainment and social interaction. The Internet is now the established norm. The days when the Internet was touted as a poster child of disruption in a deregulated space are long since over, and these days we appear to be increasingly looking further afield for a regulatory and governance framework that can challenge the increasing complacency of the very small number of massive digital incumbents.
It is unclear how successful we will be in this search for responses to this oppressive level of centrality in many aspects of the digital environment. We can but wait and see."The real story here is China and India have been quietly buying up gobs of African IP blocks - most of which are used for botting operations. I see it in my server logs.
China already de-facto owns half of Africa so it's natural they would prey on their scarce IP resources as well.
When you see AI scraping at a massive scale originating from $AFRICAN_COUNTRY IP space, and that country's GDP is smaller than Rhode Island, you sure as shit know someone else is behind it.
I pay close attention to IPv4 addresses for outgoing emails. At work we use several email services and pay for a dedicated IP(v4) at each. And when we provision a new service, we expect our new IP address to be “clean,” by which I mean it is ideally not found on any email reputation list.
For websites and services I don’t care. Some hosting platforms publish via CNAME, and some via A and AAAA records. Most seem to use a mix of v4 and v6 addressing.
The falling price of IPv4 addresses looks to me like we’ve made it to other side of the IPv6 rollout: demand for IPv4 is falling faster than supply now. Not clear if those prices are adjusted for inflation; the post-COVID spike looks like a lot of other nominal price graphs. If not, then the recent price drop is even more dramatic than it appears.
Perhaps in the long run, IPv4 becomes an artisanal choice for uses that depend on stable IP reputation: email sending, primarily. And everyone else relies on TLS for reputation signals, not caring about the IP address.
There are plenty of vectors left to squeeze the existing IPv4 space especially all the Legacy assignments held by deceased companies and individuals. There is no procedure to reclaim them. Even when you invest time and money to find the relatives, the RIR may decline a transfer so nobody invests here as long as plenty of former hosting, colocation and regional access providers leave the market after their customers moved to the US hyperscalers or out or business.
I think around 2000 every new LIR at RIPE got a /19 allocation. Smaller companies are now almost 30 years old and the founders divest their assets step by step unless someone buys everything.
There is no shortage. Go look at IPXO, you can sublease any block size. The RiR's should be reclaiming these unused addresses, but instead the ASN is allowed to sit on them or rent them out, regardless they're not being used. The shortage is caused by hoarding and RiR's not doing their job.
Just yesterday--and I don't know how I wound up there--I looked at RFC1166 (from 1990) which is "a status report on the network numbers and autonomous system numbers used in the Internet community." There's a long list of companies and individuals who were assigned "internet numbers". To my surprise, my real name is listed there! I have no clue why.
What happens when a so-called "tech" company that cannot be trusted wants to punch holes in the user's firewall without prior consent from the user
Purely hypothetical, of course
For example, WhatsApp tries to connect to at least two servers on UDP port 3478 without asking the user if this is what they want to do or explaining the purposes of these connections
Example server addresses are
57.144.221.54
31.13.70.48
3478 is the port used for "Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Through Network Address Translators (NATs)", or "STUN" for short
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3489.txt
Perhaps IPv6 would obviate the need for STUN
Not to spoil the article (but there's a lot in there) but I was particularly intrigued by the ongoing tumbling of the price of IPs. After peaking in 2022, "these days the low price of $9 per address is back to the same price that was seen in 2014."
In 2021 I speculated on IP and acquired a /23 block by ARIN wait list. I figured on running some services from the IP space for a while and after the 5 years mandated wait time would cash in when surely it would fetch $100k from some party desperate for IPv4.
At this point the services I am running are far more lucrative than the IP space itself is turning out to be.
I'm interested in any new successful startups going full IPV6 from the beginning. Once we cross that bridge, where your internal IPV4 knowledge is equivalent to token ring knowledge, there's nothing else to watch.
The country code GB in some of the tables should show the source economy being Great Britain right? Am I misunderstanding the table?
It always sends me to sleep when IP enthusiasts lament the lack of adoption for IPv6.
It's obvious to anyone that looks at the two formats that any kind of hacky workaround like NAT gateways will be preferable indefinitely to actually adopting the monstrosity that is IPv6.
Unrelated to the post, but please include a viewport tag[0] on your website; it's one line of code that makes things far easier to read on mobile.
[0]: `<meta content="initial-scale=1,width=device-width" name="viewport">`
Really need governments to start pushing harder on IPv6 adoption. We need sticks, not just carrots. My favorite is chaos engineering forced IPv4 downtime.
Unrelated to the post, but I love the left texture when I'm on vertical tab mode in FF. Very cool
how realistic is it to buy a block in 2026 as an individual? I understand that it is useless, but how much so
My ISP added IPv6 support and my router began handing out IPv6 addresses. How did I know this?
1. My AppleTV began stuttering during playback.
2. My old iMac began crashing every time it connected to the wifi.
At least the iMac has an option to disable IPv6. The AppleTV has no such option so I had to do it in the router.
The collapse in IPv4 transfer prices is what caught my eye here, dropping from a ~$55 peak in 2021 to a mean of $22 in early 2026 (figure 12).
This validates my hypothesis that the run-up in 2020–2022 was an artificial scarcity bubble driven largely by hyperscalers. AWS was right up there stockpiling before they shifted their pricing model. Once AWS introduced the hourly charge for public IPv4 addresses (effectively passing the scarcity cost to the consumer), their acquisition pressure vanished. The text notes Amazon stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025. I think they have moved from aggressive accumulation to inventory management.
We are seeing asset stranding in real-time. The market has realized that between the AWS tax and the efficacy of mobile CGNAT, the desperate thirst for public v4 space was not infinite. I'm curious to hear more takes on this.