Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#201

Post by detaro » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

rescbr wrote: post #197

jiggawatts wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First: Here in Australia no major ISPs provide a native IPv6 service, and if they do, they don't provide it to business. It's obscenely difficult to obtain IPv6 in Australia. None of the major telcos do it, you have to go down the list to like the 5th or 6th biggest ones before it becomes an "experimental option" for residential connections only. Second: Ever since IPv6 has been a thing, I've offered to customers the…

> Ever since IPv6 has been a thing, I've offered to customers [...] They've all actively refused to turn it on, for any purpose. As such a customer, I’m worried that my ISP would eventually bait-and-switch me from routable IPv4 + optional IPv6 to CGNAT IPv4 + IPv6 when convenient to them. Sorry, but I’m not risking going behind a 1:n NAT layer that I don’t manage.

Of course nothing stops an ISP putting you behind CGNAT IPv4 without IPv6.

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#202

Post by tialaramex » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #175

zokier wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I own 2048 IPv4’s myself and their value is ever increasing. Like digital real estate, without the fluctuation of crypto. Until the day when ipv6-only connectivity becomes practical/commonplace. At some point ipv4 market is going to crash when they are simply not needed anymore. Of course that inflection point might still be quite far away, but I wouldn't count on ipv4 stock being a retirement fund

But you still need an ipv4 address even if it’s only 10% of people who are ipv4 only.

Not exactly. At 70% (like today in much of the world) that's certainly a practical option for most people. At 10% not so much.

So what happens is that beyond a certain point it stops making commercial sense to route IPv4 globally. That's probably before your 10% mark. So by then there's no point bothering with IPv4 for your systems unless you specifically serve that deprived market and will spend money to connect to them specially.

For IPv4 users the Internet still mostly works, when their system asks "A? some.website.example" and there is no A record because the IPv4 Internet isn't really a thing any more, it gets an answer like "10.20.30.40" where that address was arbitrarily picked as a temporary local assignment for some.website.example. When they connect to 10.20.30.40 a Network Address Translation module behind the scenes does an IPv6 connection to some.website.example and hooks them up.

So their copy of Internet Explorer still "works" although some more advanced features are flaky or missing but hey, they know they have crappy 20th century Internet and ought to upgrade.

Inside some larger companies there already is no IPv4, and that will spread, inconsistently but it will spread, because IPv4 is a pain in the backside, it's easier without it. Translation gateways keep things mostly working enough for people who have IPv4 only, today that's the majority, a decade from now it's a minority, and eventually it's too few people to care about.

Eventually (probably much below 10%) the translation gateways are thinly used enough that "nobody" proactively notices if they're broken, that'll happen in some places faster than others, but the effect is to push those final people to upgrade because it's just annoying to always be the person calling your ISP to complain when it breaks.

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#203

Post by throw0101a » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #61

dstick wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think it would. Because despite the obvious business advantage they have, any would-be competitor would need IPs at a similar scale. That will either cost a ton more than Amazon has, or they simply won’t be available. I own 2048 IPv4’s myself and their value is ever increasing. Like digital real estate, without the fluctuation of crypto. But I would prefer it if IPv6 would take over IPv4, and fast, because it…

> I own 2048 IPv4’s myself and their value is ever increasing. Like digital real estate, without the fluctuation of crypto. Until the day when ipv6-only connectivity becomes practical/commonplace. At some point ipv4 market is going to crash when they are simply not needed anymore. Of course that inflection point might still be quite far away, but I wouldn't count on ipv4 stock being a retirement fund

> Until the day when ipv6-only connectivity becomes practical/commonplace.

IIRC, this has already occurred for mobile phones.

* https://blogs.akamai.com/2016/06/preparing-for-ipv6-only-mob...

It's (one off?) the reasons why Apple mandates that apps work with IPv6-only networks:

* https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#204

Post by throw0101a » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #46

$ wget https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json $ grep ip_prefix ip-ranges.json | sed -re 's|.*(/[0-9]+).*|\1|' | sort | uniq -c 4 /11 16 /12 30 /13 82 /14 188 /15 278 /16 70 /17 63 /18 30 /19 47 /20 111 /21 248 /22 204 /23 839 /24 68 /25 235 /26 142 /27 124 /28 50 /29 42 /30 362 /31 370 /32

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#205

Post by rescbr » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #201

rescbr wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ever since IPv6 has been a thing, I've offered to customers [...] They've all actively refused to turn it on, for any purpose. As such a customer, I’m worried that my ISP would eventually bait-and-switch me from routable IPv4 + optional IPv6 to CGNAT IPv4 + IPv6 when convenient to them. Sorry, but I’m not risking going behind a 1:n NAT layer that I don’t manage.

Of course nothing stops an ISP putting you behind CGNAT IPv4 without IPv6.

Sure, but the threat of me cancelling and switching to another ISP as the service is now unsuitable for my needs is enough to keep them from doing that.

Does this strategy work? Maybe, when I upgraded my plan they wanted to switch modems, the new one didn’t have working bridge support, and I said to them it was a requirement for me. No bridging, revert everything. The field tech escalated to engineering and they approved a business-class modem. I expect the same with IPv4, even if I have to pay extra.

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#206

Post by wut42 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

benedikt wrote: post #157

wut42 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good question, I don't get why you are downvoted. I also own some /22 and I've been so far reluctant to rent them for the reasons you mentioned.

What are you currently using them for? Are they just sitting dormant ?

Right now yeah, mostly dormant. Some are used for an anycast http frontend and anycast irc, but that's pretty much it.

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#207

Post by pc86 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

J0_k3r wrote: post #117

TechBro8615 wrote: post #49

I used to own 10k IP addresses that I sold as proxy servers to internet marketers. I made about $20k a month and it paid my bills through college. I had no idea what I was doing and eventually shut down the company, but damn, I wish I at least kept control of those things. If you want to see some sketchy shit, look deeply into what the VPN companies are doing.

man I'd have just stuck with it for 20k a month damn, good luck getting a salary that high working for some company.

Come on man everyone here works for a FAANG making $600k/yr plus stock, don't you know that?

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#208

Post by kbumsik » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

kornesh wrote: post #173

ignoramous wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industry leaders like NordVPN and ExpressVPN may engage in P2P routing (to use residential IPs especially) to unblock services like Netflix and Disney+ [1]. HolaVPN unapologetically does this too [2]. All of this is discounting the new-age dVPNs like Orchid (not quite the Tor replacement that was promised? [3]) and Mysterium [4]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?…

How does residential IPs actual work?

Maybe ISPs have a list of IPs to assign to residential customers?

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#209

Post by pc86 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

fpig wrote: post #174

gary_0 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet detects geoblocking as damage and routes around it?

It's always good for a VPN to deny any information about the customer to a server, I would imagine that's not what was referred to as sketchy. Making a user indistinguishable from a typical user from country X is just the VPN doing its job correctly. It seems, however, that at least some VPN providers use their customers' bandwidth without their knowledge to route other customers through it. I'd say that qualifies as…

Isn't the vast majority of geoblocking due to regulations, legislation, or contract agreements? That hardly qualifies as "discrimination."

Re: Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

#210

Post by pc86 » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #79

WhyDoesDangSuck wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with this if it accomplishes the goal of proxying your connection? I assume the LLCs are designed as a legal shield but would probably have their veils pierced.

I mean, I don’t have any moral problems with it. But any time you’ve got one entity opening a bunch of LLCs, I think it qualifies as sketchy.

Or good business sense, maybe? If you're in real estate and own a bunch of properties, you're going to have an LLC for each property, and maybe even one LLC for each state that owns the other ones. You could easily end up with a dozen LLCs for Maybe there's some similar avenue here.