China already de-facto owns half of Africa so it's natural they would prey on their scarce IP resources as well.

When you see AI scraping at a massive scale originating from $AFRICAN_COUNTRY IP space, and that country's GDP is smaller than Rhode Island, you sure as shit know someone else is behind it.

  "As the Internet continues to evolve, it is no longer the technically innovative challenger pitted against venerable incumbents in the forms of the traditional industries of telephony, print newspapers, television entertainment and social interaction. The Internet is now the established norm. The days when the Internet was touted as a poster child of disruption in a deregulated space are long since over, and these days we appear to be increasingly looking further afield for a regulatory and governance framework that can challenge the increasing complacency of the very small number of massive digital incumbents. 

  It is unclear how successful we will be in this search for responses to this oppressive level of centrality in many aspects of the digital environment. We can but wait and see."

This validates my hypothesis that the run-up in 2020–2022 was an artificial scarcity bubble driven largely by hyperscalers. AWS was right up there stockpiling before they shifted their pricing model. Once AWS introduced the hourly charge for public IPv4 addresses (effectively passing the scarcity cost to the consumer), their acquisition pressure vanished. The text notes Amazon stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025. I think they have moved from aggressive accumulation to inventory management.

We are seeing asset stranding in real-time. The market has realized that between the AWS tax and the efficacy of mobile CGNAT, the desperate thirst for public v4 space was not infinite. I'm curious to hear more takes on this.

For websites and services I don’t care. Some hosting platforms publish via CNAME, and some via A and AAAA records. Most seem to use a mix of v4 and v6 addressing.

The falling price of IPv4 addresses looks to me like we’ve made it to other side of the IPv6 rollout: demand for IPv4 is falling faster than supply now. Not clear if those prices are adjusted for inflation; the post-COVID spike looks like a lot of other nominal price graphs. If not, then the recent price drop is even more dramatic than it appears.

Perhaps in the long run, IPv4 becomes an artisanal choice for uses that depend on stable IP reputation: email sending, primarily. And everyone else relies on TLS for reputation signals, not caring about the IP address.

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