Yes, I think it would. Because despite the obvious business advantage they have, any would-be competitor would need IPs at a similar scale. That will either cost a ton more than Amazon has, or they simply won’t be available.
I own 2048 IPv4’s myself and their value is ever increasing. Like digital real estate, without the fluctuation of crypto. But I would prefer it if IPv6 would take over IPv4, and fast, because it will become a problem that will stifle competitors at some point. If most IPv4’s are owned by big corporations, that’s essentially.. them owning the current internet.
IPv6 is practically free.
I would love to see a breakdown of IPv4 FAANG ownership!
> I own 2048 IPv4’s myself and their value is ever increasing. Like digital real estate, without the fluctuation of crypto.
Until the day when ipv6-only connectivity becomes practical/commonplace. At some point ipv4 market is going to crash when they are simply not needed anymore. Of course that inflection point might still be quite far away, but I wouldn't count on ipv4 stock being a retirement fund
This is slowly happening. On my blog, I can see IP addresses of people who subscribed for my newsletter. It used to be 100 per cent IPv4 a year ago, now it is more like 8:1.
Not exactly. At 70% (like today in much of the world) that's certainly a practical option for most people. At 10% not so much.
So what happens is that beyond a certain point it stops making commercial sense to route IPv4 globally. That's probably before your 10% mark. So by then there's no point bothering with IPv4 for your systems unless you specifically serve that deprived market and will spend money to connect to them specially.
For IPv4 users the Internet still mostly works, when their system asks "A? some.website.example" and there is no A record because the IPv4 Internet isn't really a thing any more, it gets an answer like "10.20.30.40" where that address was arbitrarily picked as a temporary local assignment for some.website.example. When they connect to 10.20.30.40 a Network Address Translation module behind the scenes does an IPv6 connection to some.website.example and hooks them up.
So their copy of Internet Explorer still "works" although some more advanced features are flaky or missing but hey, they know they have crappy 20th century Internet and ought to upgrade.
Inside some larger companies there already is no IPv4, and that will spread, inconsistently but it will spread, because IPv4 is a pain in the backside, it's easier without it. Translation gateways keep things mostly working enough for people who have IPv4 only, today that's the majority, a decade from now it's a minority, and eventually it's too few people to care about.
Eventually (probably much below 10%) the translation gateways are thinly used enough that "nobody" proactively notices if they're broken, that'll happen in some places faster than others, but the effect is to push those final people to upgrade because it's just annoying to always be the person calling your ISP to complain when it breaks.
> I own 2048 IPv4’s myself and their value is ever increasing.
I own several /22's, and are renting them out through a broker. So far, 1 months rent (easily) covers the yearly RIR costs, so quite a good margin, and I still own them.
So when time comes, I can sell them, but before that, rent keeps coming in. Just need to make sure they are sold before the market value of an IPv4 crashes to zero.
This is a good question, I don't get why you are downvoted. I also own some /22 and I've been so far reluctant to rent them for the reasons you mentioned.
Just out of curiosity how does one go about purchasing and maintaining ownership of IPv4’s. Do you need to do it through your own company or is it possible as an individual. I’ve heard you have to demonstrate you can use them but that was in relation to IPv6’s.
Depending on which Regional Internet Registry you belong to (based on country of residence/incorporation), the process is roughly:
A) justify an AS and pay the fee
B) find someone to buy IPv4 addresses and pay them (probably a deposit)
C) justify IPv4 address space to the RIR and pay the fee to transfer from your seller
D) pay annual dues
If your RIR actually has space available, you might be able to skip step B. And you can get IPv6 addresses without finding a seller, because all the RIRs have IPv6 space.
RIR processes are generally human driven, so you might get more questions if you're filing as an individual.
It wouldn't take too much to make a breakdown of IP announcements. Ownership is a bit harder to track down, I think.
Looking at something like https://bgp.he.net/AS32934#_prefixes will tell you what IPs Facebook announces. Rinse and repeat for whoever else. Maybe a bit tricky if you need to track down subsidiary ASes.
Disclosure: I worked for WhatsApp including while it was part of Facebook, and was involved in getting AS11917 setup for WhatsApp.
I'm not sure what AS11917 is for now but the lion's share of WhatsApp now runs over/in Facebook's network/datacenters. WhatsApp chat connections are terminated on the FB edge like most other FB traffic and it shares FB's common CDN for media. AS11917 might be some legacy stuff or, as was mentioned, special policy stuff. But assuming things are as they were a year or two ago most of your WA traffic is via AS32934.
I'm not 100% sure, but if WhatsApp wanted to run their own datacenters, then they'll need their own IP ranges, and BGP/AS numbers is how IPs are "routed".
The AS number is used to let others know that a given IP range is reachable via your router.
I'd like to give a better explanation, but I think it would be wrong. BGP is really hard for me to grasp, even if my networking colleagues claims it's not really that complicated.
"Running a datacenter" isn't something that inherently needs its own IP range. You could run a datacenter only in private address space and NAT to the internet (though this wouldn't really be very practical) or even run in private space. My point is that having a lot of computers doesn't _necessarily_ require getting public IPs or ASNs.
You need public addresses if you want to be publicly reachable. If you're small you might find an ISP — let's say ISP Inc — that will give you an internet connection and allocate some part of the address space it in turn has been allocated. There's no need for BGP or dedicated IPs here — the rest of the internet already knows how to reach the range(s) of addresses assigned to ISP Inc, and from there ISP Inc's own network takes care of sending the traffic down the pipe to you.
If you need a lot more addresses, or you want to use more than one ISP (either of which could apply to WhatsApp's case), you probably need to get a dedicated assignment and an ASN. The ASN means you're an "autonomous system" — not a carved out bit of someone else's network. You go to your local registrar and convince them you need some addresses, and then you go to your ISP(s) and ask them for "transit", which means they'll connect you to their network and route to and from the rest of the internet for you. But since you're now using your own addresses it's not as simple as above, where your IPs were part of your ISP's range and everyone else just sent their traffic to your ISP for them to route to you. Your IPs are yours now, and until you tell the rest of the internet how to find you nothing will work. To make this work you have to get your ISP(s) to tell the internet "hey, y'all want to send traffic to Mr Weasel LLC? I can handle it for you". This is called "announcing" a prefix (IP range) and BGP is the mechanism through which all the routers on the internet propagate announcements detailing who is providing connectivity to who.
Conceptually this stuff is quite straightforward but in practice it can be mindbending. As well as transit there are peering arrangements (where Mr Weasel can arrange with Netflix to swap traffic over a dedicated physical connection, rather than their respective ISPs) and hella complicated traffic engineering schemes linking the big content providers to the internet. For instance, Facebook has thousands of transit and peering connections with other ISPs and providers and deciding which path is optimal for any given situation requires very complicated policies and management.
While what you suggest is possible it’s amature and fraught with problems.
Any halfway serious company that wanted to run a global application on their own infra is gonna need their own ASN and internet presence with their own IP space.
You can split hairs however you like on when one needs their own allocation. That wasn’t my point — I was just trying to illustrate to the parent poster (since they seemed uncertain) how internet routing works at a basic level and why decisions over IP space aren’t necessarily a concern for “running a datacenter”. Perhaps I took this remark too literally and I hope the parent commenter forgives me if that is the case.
The smallest routable IPv4 network on the Internet is a /24, which is 256 addresses. Regional Internet Registries won't assign you smaller than a /24, but individual ISPs might. Even if you have an assignment, maintaining it requires payment of annual fees to your RIR, unless you're a lucky "legacy" address holder from before the RIRs were formed.
I own a /24 from the early 90's, registered before ARIN and the other RIRs existed. It is considered a legacy block and I've never signed the legacy registration agreement, so no fees for me! I do have it routed to my home network over a "business broadband" connection.
I use my network mostly for experimentation and it is unlikely to be a target for hijack. If I were a commercial enterprise I would want RPKI for the future. Currently it seems mostly irrelevant in a practical sense, due to the small number of ASes actually validating.
From what I understand, the problem is in routing them. If you could buy a single IP address then all the routers need to keep a record of where that IP address goes to rather than a simple rule of this whole block goes out port 5
I own 2048 IPv4’s myself and their value is ever increasing. Like digital real estate, without the fluctuation of crypto. But I would prefer it if IPv6 would take over IPv4, and fast, because it will become a problem that will stifle competitors at some point. If most IPv4’s are owned by big corporations, that’s essentially.. them owning the current internet.
IPv6 is practically free.
I would love to see a breakdown of IPv4 FAANG ownership!