At best we can each have 3 IPv4 address.

I think it says a lot about the technological community that the solution to IPv4 has been around and viable for over a decade, but it's only as we reach the terminal stages that uptake really kicks in.

Same thing basically happened with the Y2k bug - the foresight exists, but the general community doesn't follow best practices and just hobbles along until something has to happen.

The same thing will happen with internet control. Egypt (and Canada's capping) has shown that unless you have the ISPs in your pocket, the internet is highly vulnerable to government control. And government doesn't entirely like the direction the internet is going (eg wikileaks, loss of traditional business models (and thus revenue for the govt's biggest suporters)). The potential to build a viable internet without central hubs is out there, but it will never see uptake until it's too late.

My house of 4 Irish college students contains 17 devices requiring an IP.

A more interesting breakdown is that ~50% of those devices have no (or limited) wired networking capabilities, depending mainly on cellular data and/or WiFi.