On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 11:33 AM Antonios Chariton <daknob.mac@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear list,
First of all, let me apologize if this post is not allowed by the list. To my best interpretation of the guidelines [1] it is allowed, but may be in a gray area due to rule #7.

I would like to propose the following thought experiment about IPv6, and I would like your opinion on what you believe would happen in such a case. Feel free to reply on or off list.

What if, globally, and starting at January 1st, 2020, someone (imagine a government or similar, but with global reach) imposed an IPv4 tax. For every IPv4 address on the Global Internet Routing Table, you had to pay a tax. Let’s assume that this can be imposed, must be paid, and cannot be avoided using some loophole. Let’s say that this tax would be $2, and it would double, every 3 or 6 months.

By virtue of depletion at the RIRs, there's effectively already a one-time IPv4 tax, the cost of procuring the addresses. This has indeed increased over time, and eventually we will reach a point where for many organizations acquiring IPv4 address space is not realistic either because they cannot afford it or (if you look at someone like AWS/Azure/etc who blow through lots of addresses) just won't be able to acquire the scale they need. This is happening on its own.

IPv6 deployment is happening, albeit slowly. Mobile providers are increasingly using IPv6 traffic to avoid having to push more CGNAT gear, consumer and small business ISPs are getting on board bit by bit, and while there may have been some point a bunch of years ago in looking into ways to speed adoption prior to the RIR depletion situation that we're now faced with, I'm not sure there's any meaningful benefit to trying to artificially push things forward at this point.