> IPv4 exhaustion is a real problem, it's just not enough to motivate people much.
Well, its only really a problem if you're poor. Rich people don't care - IPs are still cheap enough when you live in a wealthy country & have a decent job.
The people affected by IP address exhaustion are largely the exact set of people who can't do anything about it.
From the article, IPv4 only has 3.03 billion unique, routable addresses. The world population is 8.2 billion. So there's only enough IPv4 addresses for 1 unique address per 3 people on the planet. But of course, in reality, huge swathes of the IP address range are held by big companies (like amazon), universities and the US military.
Its very common for whole streets or neighbourhoods to collectively share a single IPv4 address. Its required, as a result of simple math.
You'll even see this in some parts of the US and UK.
What you're saying is similar to "there's limited amount of SWIFT codes", not enough for each person on earth, so each person cannot have their own bank to receive money transfers.
True, but each person does not need to have their own bank to send or receive money, they can have an account within a bank of their preference, and use that extra information to route money transfers precisely.
"But they can't route money directly" — most people will never need to.
Yeah I hear the argument that CG-NAT is fine for most people. It’s true, but kinda sad. It means most people won’t be able to run home servers, or learn to be the server for a multiplayer video game, or all sorts of other things I took for granted when learning the craft. It kinda locks in, technically, the consumer and producer relationship between computers on the internet. And for no good technical reason - just a quirk of history. CGNAT is usable; but it’s sad.
The number of people behind CGNAT is huge and rising. It's collectively worth it. And really not that much effort. (If your internal business network is sufficiently entrenched you don't have to change it.)
Well, its only really a problem if you're poor. Rich people don't care - IPs are still cheap enough when you live in a wealthy country & have a decent job.
The people affected by IP address exhaustion are largely the exact set of people who can't do anything about it.