[tptacek]

This sounds clever but actually bespeaks a lack of understanding what an IP address is. Microsoft didn't buy a "set of numbers"; they bought the rights, previously secured by another company, to insert prefixes into hundreds of thousands of routers operated (at galactic levels of expense) by hundreds of companies around the world.

[wavephorm]

So they're paying for the rights for other people to access their systems via a set of numbers. And how is that not making arbitrary numbers artificially scarce and collecting payment for them?

IPV6 really can't come soon enough.

[tptacek]

FIB sizes in core routers (operated at great expense by people you do not pay) are not an artificial scarcity.

[wmf]

IPv4 was designed in the early 1980s. Are you saying Cerf et al. made IP addresses only 32 bits so they could cash in 30 years later? Or are you saying that almost all ISPs are delaying IPv6 so they can cash in (fairly small amounts of money) on IPv4 addresses?

[wavephorm]

I guess I'm making a more broad statement that IP addresses are rare when, once we migrate to IPV6, they will be free, so we should migrate asap.

[tptacek]

They won't be free. They're not just numbers.