Consider an auto company network. behind firewalls and having thousands and thousands of robots and other factory floor machines. Most of these have IPv4 stacks that barely function and would never function on IPv6. One company estimated that they needed 40 million addresses for this purpose.
I guess I have a certain amount of skepticism that an auto company's robotic control network needs to have public IP addresses.
Of course they don't need public addresses, but they do need to have non-private globally unique IP addresses. And RFC 2050 does allow such companies to go to an RIR and get an allocation of globally unique IPv4 addresses. You may not have noticed it, but IP addresses are *NOT* Internet addresses, they are internet-protocol addresses, and can be used on or off the Internet wherever IP stacks are used. --Michael Dillon