[mindcrime]

Now that the ARIN address space is exhausted, cloud providers will begin to buy more and more IPv4 space until they have a complete monopoly and large portions of IPv4 are controlled by just a few companies. This will price other companies out of offering cloud services that are IPv4 compatible.

I don't see that being effective. IPv6 is here, and you can't put the genie back in the bottle. See above where somebody linked to the TWC page where they point out that they have reach 100% IPv6 coverage. And they are one of the largest ISP's around. (And from my subjective perception, one of the laggards on implementing IPv6). Common home routers have been shipping with IPv6 support for years, and probably a huge swathe of the 'net population (in America anyway) have dual-stack and just don't know it.

And IPv6 adoption is only going to keep growing. Pretty soon there won't be any consumers who are stuck on v4, so there will be no reason to try and establish a monopoly on v4 addresses.