Re: IPv4 flag day

[Vincent Bernat via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

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).
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