[jacobsenscott]

I would bet NAT and reclaiming of unused address space will keep the status quo going for another 20 years at least. Especially since computing is migrating to a few huge data centers where almost all the communication is over their internal private network.

[CountSessine]

That’s sort of what I’ve come to believe. Imagine an internet where there are two types of IPv4 addresses assigned. The server addresses belong to cloud data providers and are provided as elastic IPs and are used to host public websites - any kind of website that you’re likely to type into an URL bar. Client addresses are owned by ISPs and are the routable NAT addresses with thousands of customers sharing them. A few client addresses are provided to ISP customers that are willing to pay a monthly fee.

It’s ugly but it’s kind of the sort of system that everyone is incentivized to move to. Which kind of makes me sad.