Goodbye, IPv4 IANA Starts Allocating Final Address Blocks

There are unallocated /8's that are privately routed. A lot are controlled by the U.S. DoD. But every time they come up, the response is always "so what? use IPv6!"

I generally agree. Putting those in circulation would actually be a bad thing. It would allow IPv4 to continue to zombie-walk for another couple years, maybe another decade, and in so doing to become more deeply entrenched, harming us in the long-run. IPv4 is technical debt.

It's also important to consider why DoD (and some large corps too) likes to sit on these address spaces. The problem with IPv4 isn't just that there isn't a big enough address space for every device on the Internet. IPv4 also lacks enough address space to permit the easy allocation of non-conflicting private address spaces. Ask any large-scale enterprise network engineer what happens when two companies merge or want to interconnect corporate networks and both use 10.0.0.0/16 as their address space. The answer is a visit to the bottom-most circles of NAT hell where sinners are boiled in firewall port remapping rules for all eternity. Either that or one of the merging/linking entities must renumber their entire network, which is often even more painful.

It really, really pains me that so many cloud providers are taking so damn long to support IPv6. Does Amazon even support it yet? I heard Digital Ocean was finally doing a limited beta. Jeez.

Great strides could be made if Google, Wikipedia, and other major destinations had a day where they displayed a box to non-IPv6-enabled visitors telling them to contact their ISPs and ask for IPv6 and explaining why.

There are a number of other IPv6 statistics sites out there. We've tried to list a good number at:

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/ipv6/statistics/

Eric Vyncke and Lars Eggert have two good sites at:

https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/

https://eggert.org/meter/ipv6.html

Cisco 6Lab has a nice map at: http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/

It becomes more and more impossible every day.

Last time I tried to acquire a new IPv4, the distributor (my VPS host) required a technical reason for the request. If the request wasn't up to par, you would be denied an IPv4 + given an IPv6.

> …short of reclaiming something drastic like the class A block 10 (you know, a really really bad idea), dang.

10/8 is off limits, but there are a bunch of /8 blocks which could likely be reclaimed if we really needed to, including:

- About half a dozen which were allocated to the US military in the early 1990s, most of which aren't even publicly advertised at all

- 44/8, reserved for amateur radio

- A number of other /8 blocks owned by corporations, which could potentially sell or return chunks of them if properly convinced