If it was a real problem, market pricing would reflect the increasing severity of that problem.
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.
The truth is that major cloud providers such as Amazon AWS have begun to charge [more] for static, routed IPv4 addresses.
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.
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.
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.
> i would expect aws needs a year or two from when they decide to charge for something new just to work out the details
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).
In practice the tech giants such as Google, Apple and Microsoft will dictate adoption of technology. When Chrome starts mandating or heavily recommending IPv6, adoption will reach 99% overnight. That's what happened with https: https://www.znetlive.com/blog/google-chrome-68-mandates-http...
The market price is only something like 5 or 10 dollars a month, but anyone having to pay that to be accessible is an embarrassing failure of the system. It doesn't matter whether it's a big dent in the number of IPs or not.
There are billions of people out there who can access the internet, and make themselves accessible through the internet the way they want, just fine without a dedicated IP address.
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.
But is it "well off people not having a problem paying a buck or two directly or indirectly to an american corporation to be able to bounce traffic" which you refer to as "most people"? I can see how a few billion other people would have problems with that concept for many reasons apart from the obvious financial one.
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.
This isn't necessarily true. The scarcity of IPv4 addresses could very well induce a lack of demand and decrease the price. You wouldn't dream of developing a technology that requires people to have an individual IP address, so you don't. This massively reduces the demand for v4 addresses. It's not as if there are users out there who will demand the features you can't implement, and it's not as if you could fund the entire IPv6 network by yourself to bring about those features. Then ISPs have no reason to support v6 because no customers demand it. Instead of increased price, the cost is paid through decreased service. Think of a congested road network. It could be well worth it to build some more roads and ease congestion, but if there is no one in the system willing to pay for it, everyone will suffer.
The network experience on Nintendo devices always seemed janky and home-grown. I feel like they built everything from scratch at corp HQ complete with wonky edge cases.
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.
Most people don’t need a public IPv4 address and can live with CGNAT.
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.
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.