[sidewndr46]

This an interesting aspect to me because it means even the lowest quality, poorest run, failing infrastructure ISP has nearly liquid assets of about $30 million USD if they have half a million customers.

That's a staggering amount of money & it isn't locked up in assets like real estate.

[BlueTemplar]

Not just ISPs, some other companies (IBM ?) and universities managed to get huge address chunks early on for pennies.

This scarcity creates perverse incentives, I'm surprised that the governments aren't doing their job in first forcing new hardware to be IPv6-compatible, then later forbidding new hardware to be IPv4-compatible, like they did for digital TV tuners and low consumption light bulbs... maybe because the lobbying is pushing in the opposite direction in this case for the aforementioned reason ?