Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

I used to own 10k IP addresses that I sold as proxy servers to internet marketers. I made about $20k a month and it paid my bills through college. I had no idea what I was doing and eventually shut down the company, but damn, I wish I at least kept control of those things.<p>If you want to see some sketchy shit, look deeply into what the VPN companies are doing.

I’m more surprised that a single IP address is worth $20 apparently than Amazon owning 100 million of them.<p>What I wonder, is it a competitive advantage for Amazon at this point that they have so many? Phrased differently, would it benefit Amazon if the current status quo of IPv4 vs IPv6 adoption is maintained?

This is 2.5% of the total adress space - not usable, total. It&#x27;s about the equivalent of 6.25 class A (&#x2F;8) prefixes. Quite impressive.

A small nitpick: They don&#x27;t &quot;own&quot; these addresses, the regional internet registries (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC etc.) loan them to Amazon so they can use them, they could take them away again if AWS would do something that&#x27;s against the RIRs&#x27; policies.<p>We also have a single &#x2F;22 block of addresses from RIPE (we were one of the last companies to get such a block in 2019), so far we haven&#x27;t made use of it though as it&#x27;s still a bit tricky to find providers that will announce your addresses (without asking a hefty amount of money for it).

<p><pre><code> $ wget https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ip-ranges.amazonaws.com&#x2F;ip-ranges.json $ grep ip_prefix ip-ranges.json | sed -re &#x27;s|.*(&#x2F;[0-9]+).*|\1|&#x27; | sort | uniq -c 4 &#x2F;11 16 &#x2F;12 30 &#x2F;13 82 &#x2F;14 188 &#x2F;15 278 &#x2F;16 70 &#x2F;17 63 &#x2F;18 30 &#x2F;19 47 &#x2F;20 111 &#x2F;21 248 &#x2F;22 204 &#x2F;23 839 &#x2F;24 68 &#x2F;25 235 &#x2F;26 142 &#x2F;27 124 &#x2F;28 50 &#x2F;29 42 &#x2F;30 362 &#x2F;31 370 &#x2F;32</code></pre>

From what I understand the problem with IPv6 isn&#x27;t technical problems it is with legacy. According to what I know in Africa and Asia they have mostly already been running on IPv6 the problem is just basically a bunch of lazy network admins in NA and the EU that don&#x27;t want to learn the new tech and organizations that don&#x27;t want to switch.

Let&#x27;s use IPv6 more and it&#x27;ll worth far less than $2B.

How are we not out of IPv4 addresses already? Aren&#x27;t there a billion phones out there? And probably the same number of PCs and god knows how many servers?

What, besides DNS, is preventing the migration to IPv6? Is it old technology still in use? My house is completely IPv6 and not intentionally so.

I assume the $2B valuation is precisely <i>because</i> of services like AWS needing so many

That&#x27;s a competitive advantage they have, which dis-incentivizes them from pushing IPv6 adoption.

There seems to be a lot of double counting in that list. For example, 44.192.0.0&#x2F;11 and 44.224.0.0&#x2F;11 are listed twice. Then there are 28 entries of 44.x.x.x that would fall under the two &#x2F;11&#x27;s already listed.

What are the reasons for slow IPv6 adoption a whole two decades after notification by IETF? I am assuming the demand for IPv4 address blocks is mainly driven by backwards compatibility requirements.

For web serving it&#x27;s possible to have IPv6-only server accessible to anyone. Just use Cloudflare. I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s documented but I started using IPv6-only origin server behind Cloudflare and it seems to work OK for people connecting both IPv4 and IPv6. The client IP is in CF-Connecting-IP, even for IPv4 connections. For me it just works.

Impressive, however just like the stock market, if you try to dump all those, It won&#x27;t worth anything close to $2B.

Previous discussion (two months ago): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24839887" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24839887</a>

Different metric: they own ~2.558% of all the available ipv4 addresses.

About 8 million of those, a bit under 10%, came from MIT selling half of their &#x2F;8 to Amazon. They sure accumulated a bunch of others though.

So do they actually use these addresses for something or are they simply stockpiling them?<p>Some jurisdictions have laws regarding real estate that, if it not be used for about a decade, it becomes legal to squat.<p>This is primarily in densely populated jurisdictions where real estate is a scarcity and the government doesn&#x27;t want it to go unused.<p>A similar structure could actually be made for IPv4 addresses.

I’d be curious how that compares to other cloud providers.

Why do ipv4 addresses still hold so much value? Isn’t there an abundance of ipv6 available already?

At this point, it’s the same as RF spectrum. Yet clearly there is no regulatory body to manage it.

large majority of cheap networked electronics only can do IPv4.

Since when does IPv4-addresses cost money? I&#x27;m pretty sure IPs are allocated for free if available and you have a use case for them?<p>I know RIPE now want members to charge customers for IPs, but..

Does anyone sell a &#x2F;30 or smaller block?

IPv4 is the next Bitcoin ;)

Your ISP doesn’t want real IPv6. It’s bad for business.

2B is not a big deal for Amazon or AWS