AWS announces new charges for every IPv4 address in use.

ISP/colo provider here: We've been offering IPv6 at no cost for like 15+ years now...less than half our customer base asked for an allotment, and less than half who did really put it to use. The ones who did put it to use run operations that MUST be reachable by everyone so then in turn run a full IPv4 stack as well. We have customers in our facilities who are big name brands that some people reading this probably used or interacted with today...most of them don't run IPv6. If something doesn't become unreachable then most people don't have much incentive to fix anything. Aside from that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have been quietly buying up huge ranges of IP space over the past several years and paying 3-4 times more the going rate knowing it is a limited resource. I've been involved in several backroom deals where some of our customers who only needed a /24 or two happened to be sitting on a /16 or similar and once someone at the big three caught wind of that they would have offers they can't refuse in the range many times higher than the going market rate. Most people don't know there is an entire group a one of these companies who only deals with acquiring IP space. The requests would come from attorneys representing a private party and once the first stages were put in writing we'd find out it was Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. One deal with Amazon that I was involved in resulted in a market rate of around $19/IP at the time, then comes Amazon offering $55+/IP. They paid around $3.7m for that /16 and here we are many years later with that block still not being used nor does it even show up in their routing table, they are simply hoarding space. There are other blocks I saw them buy that are also still not in use, Google and Microsoft have done the same. Google bought enough IPs from one customer that the value of the sale was worth more than the company who owned them. As the market consolidates we are starting to see the big players hoarding a finite resource they keep making a land grab on. That in turn allows them to continue competing with each other and raising the cost to their customers. We along with other providers have had IPv4 prices at $0.50/IP for years, some providers have moved to $1/IP, now seeing AWS sitting on a massive pile of IPv4 space going to $3.50+/IP is exactly what they were planning to do many years ago. This will be the justification that others use to increase their prices and will probably trigger a little more IPv6 growth. Still until there is a big enough shift to make IPv4 not so important it is going to be many years before we see IPv6 as the preferred option.