If only ARIN started to revoke IPv4 blocks based on this kind of waste.
If ARIN did ever want to recover space, there are much bigger fish in the sea (I doubt Apple is using all 16.7 million IPs in their 17.0.0.0/8 allocation, for example).
Each hop is using a /30. There's 47 useless hops in the mix before reaching the end.
That's 188 IP addresses just wasted. Much, much more than a /27. In fact that's 6 times the waste of a /27.
Presumably if Epik runs out of IP space in their /20, they'll just shut this down. It's not like some other company could use that /24.
Again, if ARIN/IANA really wanted to reclaim "wasted" space, they'd be looking at the holders of big blocks like /8-16, and asking them to justify usage, not one random /24 which is ultimately insignificant.
It's reasons like this why people now have to fill out forms justifying the need for additional IPv4 blocks.
Epik already went to ARIN, said "we need a /20 to meet our IPv4 needs", filled out the paperwork to justify the allocation, and ARIN said "yes". Out of those 16 /24's, they have one that doesn't have any hosts on it at the moment, so they let him play with it.
The only people this MIGHT be hurting is Epik, if they need to justify getting more space from ARIN at some point. For the other millions of people on the Internet: it's awesome. Lighten up and enjoy it.
(edit: grammar)
Not all things that are better are free.
Citation?
(At some level, 128 > 32, so unless all the algorithms used for routing are constant-time over the addresses, IPv6 will always cost more. But if you add up a bunch of layers of NAT, that's not free either. So this argument boils down to "if nobody used the Internet, it would require less hardware to run". Well, yeah.)
As always, a happy medium is required. That being said, once you boot up another stack, allocate various caches, and have your engineers maintain an additional set of configuration, the costs come down. But for ~10k routes, the costs to route those ips is greater than routing v4.