Nice, they will be released, so the blocks can be bought by AWS, etc extractring rents for a long time ... Why don't we switch to ipv6.
Releasing them could be the best thing for IPv6 to ever happen.
Next most likely is they are re-classed for private usage.
If they are re-assigned for use on the internet they will be assigned to the RIRs and distributed under their policies. No no way AWS are gonna be able to hoover them up like they can when acquiring space from existing holders.
Because the IPv4 NAT technology exists.
Imagine if billions of printers, weather stations, baby monitors, toothbrushes and thermostats suddenly obtain publicly routeable address...
I know you can do address harvesting like it was done with pool.ntp.org by shodan but if you don't use any public services your IoT devices are basically protected by the 128bit address space. So you need a address harvesting possibility, and people are watching for this as seen in the shodan case, and an exploitable issue at the same time. Not impossible and you should use a firewall but orders of magnitude less scary than a public routable IPv4 address.