On 2026-06-16 09:08, Lu Heng via NANOG wrote:
One observation is that IPv4 scarcity remains one of the few genuine scarcity mechanisms in the Internet industry. From an economic perspective, many stakeholders have incentives to continue operating within that framework rather than accelerate a transition that would largely eliminate it.
I've worked for a cloud provider, a content provider, and an ISP. In all cases, there was no interest in artificially keeping IPv4 only. Cloud providers interest are aligned with their customers: if customers want IPv6, you'll implement IPv6. Small and large ISPs need IPv6 because large NAT boxes are expensive to maintain and IPv6 have nicer mechanisms to provide IPv4 than NAT44 or NAT444. Content providers are enabling IPv6 to workaround broken NAT boxes and avoid blocking N unrelated customers because they share the same IPv4 address. Once an ISP has most of its customers on IPv6, their traffic becomes mostly IPv6. Same discourse with a bit more details: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2024-why-ipv6 All this won't make IPv4 disappear, but IPv6 already transports most of the Internet economy. Google stats show that more than half the users are on IPv6 and any IPv6-enabled stats show that two thirds of the services in volume are on IPv6. The only ones that have an economic interest in keeping IPv4 scarce are people leasing and selling IPv4 (and you seem to be in this group).