Cellphones are the main driver of IPv6 adoption as it is; many countries you're behind CGNAT if you hit an IPv4 endpoint, but you go direct if they support IPv6.

It’s not that ipv4 space is exhausted, there’s plenty of it available. It’s that early on it was mismanaged to the point that people / companies were able to buy entire /8’s for basically nothing and hold them forever.

Given the top rate* for handing out ipv4 some 10 years ago, every such "wasted" /8 would give you days to weeks before being used up again. What do you intend to do when those 2 weeks are up?

*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#/media...

the global burn rate was 4-6 weeks for a /8, iirc

but there are waitlists to fulfill, so...you're probably still right.

(tl;dr: "repatriate the poorly allocated legacy ip space" is a losing proposition)

Single-purpose accounts aren't allowed on HN (they're too predictable and predictability is the antithesis of curiosity) - so I've banned this account. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and we can figure something out.

Related anecdote, my (small) school had acquired a /16 way back and so today, every single device on the network gets its own public ipv4. It was an absolute mess for security (imagine a small army of first year CS majors setting up each a Raspberry Pi) but it was kinda fun being able to experiment with servers without having to worry about NAT.

they could just firewall inbound connections and have some sort of request/interface to allow certain/all ports whilst keeping everything lovely about public v4 though, yeah?

A long, long time ago my (large) school had 2 /16s and a bunch of /24s and every device--including those in the medical center--got a public, internet accessible IP address. https://itconnect.uw.edu/tools-services-support/networks-con...

And Chinese companies have bought all of the free space in places like Africa and are leasing them out.