The IPv6 Transition

IPv4 exhaustion is a real problem, it's just not enough to motivate people much.

The truth is that people who care about port forwarding are such a small minority -- especially now that P2P file sharing has lost its hype -- that they don't make a visible dent in the rate of IPv4 exhaustion.

Maybe you have a definition of "access" that is different from the usual one. That's fine, but let's be honest, it's not the usual definition.

Last I checked (a few years ago, I suppose), AWS APIs were incapable of using IPv6 internally, so a VPC still needed to dual-stack it in order to use AWS cloud features. That may have changed by now.

Now IPv4 prices are returning to pre-Covid long-term trends. But of course Amazon won't reflect that in their pricing table.

Being able to relay through a third party is a different thing.

IPv4 prices peaked in early 2022; AWS started charging for public IPv4 in 2024 (announced in 2023):

* https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address...

If they had increased prices in 2022 (or at least announced in 2022), then I could see some kind of correlation, but give it was 1.5-2 years after, I doubt there is a connection.

For better or worse, IP blocks are still very common. It's easy to complain about this, but there aren't really any good methods to deal with persistent abuse.

Well, its only really a problem if you're poor. Rich people don't care - IPs are still cheap enough when you live in a wealthy country & have a decent job.

The people affected by IP address exhaustion are largely the exact set of people who can't do anything about it.

And for everyone that does pay this "internet tax", it only strengthens the position of said corporations to be able to buy up even more of the available routable ips. It's not hard to see that the end result is very much not in the consumers favor, regardless of how unnecessary it feels for customers currently to have a real ip when all they want is kitten animations on social media.

Its very common for whole streets or neighbourhoods to collectively share a single IPv4 address. Its required, as a result of simple math.

You'll even see this in some parts of the US and UK.

The reason that IPv6 is so lightly used is that it’s cheaper to use IPv4 + workarounds.

I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, or making any value judgment about IPv4 vs IPv6.

People and businesses don’t spend money on technology upgrades where the benefit is not measurably better than what they already have.

This is just common sense; no one wants to throw away money.

If you want people to use IPv6, then IPv4 has to fail first. As long as people keep making it work then the benefits of changing will never outweigh the costs.

BTW this is exactly the same situation as clean energy vs fossil fuel, etc. In that situation governments are actively putting their thumb on the economic scales in all sorts of ways. Again, I’m not offering a value judgment, just an observation.

The price had already dropped, and was continuing to fall, when they announced the change, so if rising acquisition cost was the primary reason for adding the IPv4 charge, it had already went away.

I think AWS has looked at a utilization graph and sees a time their current pool is get used up at current rates and doesn't want to go through the hassle of acquiring more IPv4 addresses, regardless of cost (even if it is "cheap").

I also think that they have statistic for their www.Amazon.com storefront, and maybe are seeing a good proportion from IPv6 and so figure that there's a 'critical mass' (especially mobile).

Either this or a "killer app" use-case that requires IPv6 will push it forward significantly, IMHO.

Cheaper? Hetzner and other hosts give IPv6 addresses out for free and charge extra for IPv4 addresses.

Companies will relay your video calls for free. For now. Basically undercutting. The only way to prevent undercutting is by the government regulation.

If more people wanted an IP, the price would just rise. The same percentage of people (less than 1/3) would have one. They would just pay more.

It’s like buying land in a city like SF. Demand can change the price, but the supply remains the same.

1) CG-NAT

2) IPv6

You literally can not have one unique IPv4 address per mobile phone.

They're moving onto the "squeeze" part of the cycle.

True, but each person does not need to have their own bank to send or receive money, they can have an account within a bank of their preference, and use that extra information to route money transfers precisely.

"But they can't route money directly" — most people will never need to.

Says you need to have an AWS NAT for that to work. And AFAIK, setting up a NAT requires an ipv4 elastic ip.

And it makes since that AWS would want customers to have their own IP for NAT64, so that if one customer does something to get the ip address blocklisted it doesn't impact other customers.

For the relatively small number of people who do need public addresses, renting them from a cloud provider or buying blocks at auction are still economically viable, in comparison to the capital costs of upgrading everything that needs upgrading to support IPv6-only.

Though I don't think AWS cares too much about IP blocklist, you can always just get another elastic IP at any moment.