Public IPs are about $10/each on the market. If you're running a serious service, $10 is a fairly small cost, so you just buy whatever you need. IPv4 exhaustion has mostly affected people that were getting addresses for "free".
I thought it was interested that only a couple of years ago paying for IPs was very much against policy and now they even have pointers to brokers on the APNIC website.
Selling things for what the market will bear is the only way we've managed to figure out to fairly provide resources to those who want them the most.
I "rent" a static IP from my ISP (Internode) because IPv6 still breaks random devices on my network (Xbox One, I'm looking at you).
Although in this case becoming an ISP isn't impossible, it's certainly out of my reach.
Once you've done that, buy transit from a provider in your data center or office building, set up a BGP speaker (Quagga, BIRD, GoBGP), and announce your IP space (has to be at least a /24 for IPv4, and a /48 for IPv6).
This whole process can be done in under a month.
To sell internet connectivity here you must have a carrier license from ACMA. I've heard that it costs ~3k to get one. Which makes setting up an neighbourhood ISP just expensive enough that no one bothers. (this is on top of all the normal costs you mentioned)
- Transit (500Mbps on a 10G port can be had for ~$300/mo in major DCs)
- a /24 or larger IPv4 prefix (Can be free/cheap from your transit provider) or buy one from a broker (usually only /22s and up, @ $6-12/IP)
- a /48 or larger IPv6 prefix (Usually free/cheap from your transit provider) or you can get one from ARIN for ~$2000/yr (for a /32)
- an RIR membership (< $500/yr)
- an ASN (~$500 from your RIR + $100-200/yr)
source: I've done this myself, and helped others do it.
Bah.
mostly affected people that were getting addresses for "free".
There are still a lot of "free" IPv4 addresses out there.
The problem is the cost of IPv4 addresses is not evenly applied. There's hoarding by some early adopters. E.g. I see that Stanford gave back its original /8 allocation, but MIT did not.[1] And why is Prudential Securities still sitting on a Class A block?
If MIT or Prudential had to pay 16,777,216 * $10 per month for their IP addresses, you can bet that most would be returned within 48 hours! Even if they had to pay only $16 million per year, you can bet they'd return most of those addresses.
A true capitalist solution to the IPv4 "shortage" never happened. That's why you have the current situation. Some organizations are sitting on huge swaths of unused addresses, others (the free market) are forced to pay $10 per month.
There are about 4 billion possible IPv4 addresses (sure, some are reserved for e.g. multicast, but those could have been reclaimed). If each and every IPv4 address cost $10 per month, there would never have been a need for IPv6. Even if each and every IPv4 address cost only $1 per month (about $50 billion per year in aggregate), there would never have been a need for IPv6. Or at least IPv6 could have been postponed for a while and "done right".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
IPv4 markets are a dead-end and are no substitute for a real solution.
For reference, there's about 630k active BGP entries, with 50k more per year. It would only accelerate the death of those routers by six months, 24k entries, to split up everything larger than /16.
If you want to compare to real estate, it is more like building a completely new city in the middle of nowhere. Initially the costs are high because you have to build new infrastructure. Initially, there is nobody there so there is no incentive to move to the new city.
As the new city gets popular, everybody who has real estate in other cities may feel compelled to get real estate in the new city as well, but they don't have to give up their old property.
IMO Postel's allocation of IP addresses can be rationalized from a capitalist viewpoint as a form of homesteading. Some people end up with windfall profits three decades later, but it's a small price to pay for a peacefully functioning market. Owning a $100M asset that's underutilized is already an economic incentive to free up addresses (just don't tell my company); a Georgist property tax on IP addresses would provide even more incentive but it would also likely cause a revolt.
Since there are going to be 4B devices on the Internet soon if not already, talking about "there would never have been a need for IPv6" seems to imply the existence of an address-less underclass.
Yeah I really screwed up on that one!!!
I got confused because often the retail price is in that range. E.g. Comcast Business will give you a static IP for $20/month.[1] But reading further, they will give you 13 extra IPs for $40/month, so clearly I didn't think it through.
[1] I can't link directly to that information on Comcast's site, but it can be found here by clicking on Static IP pricing. https://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet
Now everybody's pretty much out. So I don't know DO's blocks, but very likely if they're running out they're having to buy more. Depending on how they cut it up a /16 -- I know they have at least one /16, because it came up here yesterday -- can serve at least 60,000 droplets or so.