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IP Addresses Through 2025
- tokyobreakfast 9mo agoThe 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.
- rendx 9mo agoI see this often that people refer to countries as actors. Are you implying that the government of these countries bought those resources and they're now owned by the government? Or are you saying that citizens/corporations of those countries are buying? I find it weird, I wouldn't use the phrase "The United States is buying XYZ" unless it was the current government doing so?
- tokyobreakfast 9mo agoBoth. In the case of China, I believe it's government or CCP-controlled entities, and the end-game is something more nefarious. For India, IMO it's private industry. They're just trying to make a buck.
- butvacuum 9mo agoIt seems to be widly accepted that the Chinese State (don't know about India) often imposes on or sponsers citizens to perform actions it finds adventagious. And, I'd say, the US is known to do this. I'll lead with 'Project Azorian' to back it up.
- Earendil137 9mo agoIndia does it too. You see it on all socials as well as reddit. Brain dead posts and comments praising the current govt or gate against anyone criticising.
- leosanchez 9mo ago> You see it on all socials as well as reddit Almost all the Indian subreddits are against the current government. You will be banned from a subreddit even if you rightly speak in support of current government on Reddit. It's hard to take your rest of your comment seriously if you are blatantly dishonest about this.
- wongogue 9mo agoThe official one isn’t but there are a lot more in support of it. They are just named differently. Local language (we have a lots of them) or endonyms etc.
- leosanchez 9mo agoAll national subreddits are anti-government. The popular regional ones like r/delhi is anti-government too. If you know any pro-government subreddits let me know, I would love to join.
- WarmWash 9mo agoIn the US, the government can apply pressure and bargain with companies for favor, but there is no legal requirement of companies agreeing (shy of court orders). Far more than cases of corporate compliance with the government are cases of corporate defiance. In China, there is no meaningful difference between the party and any Chinese company. Companies are seed funded by the state and carry the will of the state. There is no "come back with a court order" in China. And even if there was, the courts are also just another arm of the party.
- TrueDuality 9mo agoI'm not sure the distinction matters, and attribution is inherently hard and easy to get wrong. I frequently read Country X is doing Y, less as a indicator of government action and more of a single that we can't be more specific of who within the country is performing an action but we know the behavior is occurring there. In the case of IP address purchases, these are publicly tied to specific public and private entities and can be easily queried through the regional registries. These private entities are frequently the same kind of shell company you'll get with hiding shady financial details.
- landl0rd 9mo agoChina does not have a meaningful distinction between private industry and the state. She also maintains a level of surveillance and control, particularly in the IT world, that makes this hard with some level of government sanction.
- Andrex 9mo agoSidebar: I've never stopped and considered the gender of nations, but in the tradition of ships I guess it makes sense.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- pixl97 9mo ago>Are you implying that the government of these countries bought those resources and they're now owned by the government You have to take these issues with nuance instead of looking at them black and white. If the US government gives you a billion dollar subsidy to do some particular action, is the action that is done the will of the corporation or the will of the government? If the US government is paying private companies to 'gain information on' foreign entities, is that the will of the private companies or of the government itself? If when a US company acquires a resource the US government can ask nicely for it with the threat of implied violence if you don't give it, is that a private resource or not? And, note, I'm talking about the US that has relatively strong property rights and not about China where the government has far more leeway with the operation of companies, and absolutely uses them for nation state level information gathering.
- petercooper 9mo agoNot 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."
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Bluecobra 9mo agoI was also surprised to find that out the other day when someone on Reddit was complaining they couldn’t get a good price on a /17 they were hoarding to sell for a profit. Good riddance.
- ramon156 9mo agoUnrelated to the post, but I love the left texture when I'm on vertical tab mode in FF. Very cool
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoI am on zen which you can consider to be as vertical tab mode in FF as well (considering zen is based on FF) (but all be it, I love how slick zen looks! Zen is amazing) And I have the same texture too! I hadn't observed it until your message
- seszett 9mo agoUnless I misunderstand something, that texture is not especially related to Firefox or vertical tabs. I have it both under Firefox or Chromium, and whether my tabs are vertical or not. It's just the website's background.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- kincl 9mo agoThe country code GB in some of the tables should show the source economy being Great Britain right? Am I misunderstanding the table?
- graemep 9mo agoThat looks weird. I am guessing that someone knows about the mismatch between ccTLDs (where the UK is .uk) and ISO codes (where the UK is GB and Ukraine is UA) and tried to correct something and got it wrong. its correct in other tables.
- pumplekin 9mo ago.uk being the TLD, and .gb being the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code is a quirk of history that comes with .uk being on the internet very early.
- blakesterz 9mo agoThis 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."
- dlcarrier 9mo agoIf you think the time that a given social network spends at the top is long now, wait until there's a "regulatory and governance framework" knocking out most newcomers.
- bigbadfeline 9mo ago> We can but wait and see. Don't bring technology to a political fight, the hoarders've got more tech than you, "wait and see" is what a bag of sand does at the gun range.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- chromehearts 9mo agoIPv6 will change the world. Believe in it
- grishka 9mo agoHow many more decades will I have to wait to have IPv6 from my ISP though?
- simoncion 9mo agoTry switching ISPs. [0] Even Comcast provided me IPv6 service fifteen, twenty years ago. [0] Yes, I am aware that that's simply not possible for most folks. I used to be most folks, so I definitely know.
- Fiveplus 9mo agoThe 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.
- zokier 9mo agoIt is noteworthy that in 2020 AWS had very limited ipv6 support, but these days they have at least some support in the most critical services.
- newsoftheday 9mo agoWhen AWS rolled out plans to start charging for IPv4 addresses: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address... "As you may know, IPv4 addresses are an increasingly scarce resource and the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years. This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure." Their move disgusted me and I moved from AWS to OCI.
- assimpleaspossi 9mo agoJust 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.
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- Ericson2314 9mo agoReally need governments to start pushing harder on IPv6 adoption. We need sticks, not just carrots. My favorite is chaos engineering forced IPv4 downtime.
- dorfsmay 9mo agoOr we should start a wall of shame of services not available on IPv6.
- apearson 9mo agohttps://whynoipv6.com/ https://whynoipv6.com/
- johnisgood 9mo agoWhat holds them back though? Even my shitty self-hosted website on a not-so-known VPS supports IPv6.
- apearson 9mo agoI'm assuming priorities and convincing the old guard it's something to do
- zorpner 9mo agoIt provides no benefit, so even the smallest amount of added complexity or additional engineering effort required isn't worthwhile.
- johnisgood 9mo agoI did not have to put any additional engineering effort into it though.
- tredre3 9mo agoBecause in your own words what you built is "a shitty self-hosted website", not a complex web of distributed services that need to talk to each-other.
- snowwrestler 9mo agoI 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.
- hnuser123456 9mo agoThere is a growing grey market for IPv4 still, though, and probably always will be. It seemed like people were treating them like crypto for a while. Still people out there trying to re-route old abandoned ranges. There are still a lot of legacy ranges that belong to defunct organizations and never got properly sold.
- cyberax 9mo ago> dig AAAA github.com > dig AAAA amazon.com Hm... It's more likely that the widespread deployment of CGNAT and 464XLAT in mobile networks made the IPv4 scarcity a non-issue. The some CGNAT solutions can multiplex more than 20000 devices onto a single IPv4 address. I'm a very early adopter of IPv6, and I _still_ have operational issues with it.
- betaby 9mo agoamazon.com is IPv4-only redirector to www.amazon.com which is dual-staked. The same is true for amazon.fr.
- SchemaLoad 9mo agoIn the future we will have v6 only clients making v4 almost worthless since not all users will be able to connect to it.
- alexinavar 9mo agoUnrelated 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">`
- chrismorgan 9mo agoI’m curious about that meta viewport declaration and where it came from: I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it in that order. The customary ordering has the attributes and content properties all reversed: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">
- kccqzy 9mo agoNo. You either design the site to be fully responsive (which would necessarily include CSS changes), or leave out that line. If your CSS assumes a desktop layout, it is strictly better not to set the viewport width to device-width so that the mobile browsers will use the traditional desktop viewport and the user can zoom around without anything broken. In contrast, carelessly slapping that line without CSS changes will often lead to content being clipped and invisible on mobile. This is why I have a bookmarklet to delete any viewport meta elements.
- neoromantique 9mo agohow realistic is it to buy a block in 2026 as an individual? I understand that it is useless, but how much so
- zamadatix 9mo agoDifferent RIRs & LIRs have different policies, but the "foolproof" way is to just set up an LLC and register resources through that. There are usually renewal fees as well. If you're not hoping to be able to sell them after you get them, a careful reading of RIR policies can usually net you one or two /24s without needing to buy any blocks. In either case, if you end up with internet resources you can trawl through sites like https://bgp.services/ https://bgp.services/ to find a cheap VPS provider near you that supports peering. I run my own AS and advertise 3 network blocks (2 IPv4 + 1 IPv6) out of 2 different DCs for several hundred $ per year all in all (including renewal fees, VPS, taxes, etc).
- jakey_bakey 9mo agoIt 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.
- shmerl 9mo agoNAT is the monstrosity, not IPv6.
- dist-epoch 9mo agoBut has the nice side-effect of working as a firewall, before traffic gets to you.
- shmerl 9mo agoNo, it does not. Always use a firewall if you need a firewall. NAT is not a replacement for it.
- 9rx 9mo agoNAT has the side-effect of working as a shower curtain. It will mostly keep light drops of water out, but will not stand up to a fire.
- ianburrell 9mo agoIPv6 routers use a stateful firewall just like NAT includes. Just without the problems of NAT.
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoI'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.
- awestroke 9mo agoGithub still refuses to switch on support for ipv6 traffic for some reason, so you can't interact with github then
- speedgoose 9mo agoIt would be a strange and unnecessary risk to take for a startup in my opinion.
- patmorgan23 9mo agoIt's really not a risk, as long as you dual stack your edge.
- oasisbob 9mo agoExclusively IPv6 without any transitional mechanisms would be difficult to succeed with. However, there are network upstarts like Jio (India) which made huge v6 investments from day one which use 464xlat for subscribers to access v4-only resources.
- immibis 9mo ago
- bastardoperator 9mo agoThere 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.
- billyjobob 9mo agoMy 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.
- rmoriz 9mo agoThere 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.
- psim1 9mo agoIn 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agoWhat 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 https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3489.txt Perhaps IPv6 would obviate the need for STUN
- 8bitsrule 9mo agoThis article would be more useful if it started with an abstract.
- ilvez 9mo agoDuring the holidays I refactored my home network. It was a fun project and I'm still kind of tinkering with it. At one point I decided that now let's go all in on IPv6 and it works now. Only thing that I couldn't do was route traffic from internet to my end devices, because I understood my ISP and the provided modem. I'm yet to pressure them, maybe they can do it manually for me.. But I'm glad I did it and getting 10/10 in https://test-ipv6.com/ https://test-ipv6.com/ is satisfying. At least this home traffic contributes to migration.. I'm thinking about going full on IPv6 now with NAT64, but that a stretch already, because it needs upgrading a gear.
- jcgl 9mo agoFwiw (in case it hadn't occurred to you already), there's no technical requirement to run your NAT64 on your router/modem/CPE. You could run the NAT64 on a Raspberry Pi or some other little device for instance.
- Barathkanna 9mo agoTLDR: IPv4 is fully exhausted and no longer growing. Internet growth now depends on IPv6 adoption and address sharing, but IPv6 rollout is still uneven across regions.