>Counting the cost of creating the company so you can actually deal directly with a NIC?

No, the question was taking the price that the NIC sells the IP blocks at. Understanding that in order to get 1 IPv4 address you will be buying from a distributor at a markup, but still, with Wholesale prices at 0.6$ (LACNIC) to 2.5$ (ARIN) per IP address per year, even with a markup of 300%, we are still at filthy cheap prices (2.4$/year to 10$/year)

>Every. Single. Individual. End. User. Device. Should. Be. Addressable. Given that there are more such devices out there then there are IPv4 addresses to begin with, cost doesn't even come into it.

Oh, ok, I was writing mostly about server side IPv4 assignment. I guess your position is a much stronger stance than mine, I argue that all servers should have an IP(v4) adress, you argue that every client device should. In that sense, consider that there's a lot of users, on this website even, that insist on running hosts without a dedicated IP address. There's lower hanging fruit.