Microsoft Azure’s use of non-US IPv4 address space in US regions

I would say that this is going to become a normal occurrence soon in many other IT companies running out of IPv4 space. An easy way currently to get more IPv4 space is for example to buy them from other regions like EUs RIPE.<p>RIPE for example actually sold IPv4 classes at some point so all those are actually owned by their respective owners and can be rented out or outright be sold. In order to be able to use any of these RIPE IP spaces all you will need is to have a valid PA account&#x2F;membership with RIPE and you can use them anywhere and not only in EU.

This is not limited to the US, either. I have an Azure account hosted in the North Europe datacenter (in Dublin), and our IP addresses are associated with Brazil in the GeoIP databases.

Oh, this is why I can&#x27;t download Youtube videos via Azure VMs.

How did the phrase &quot;non-US IPv4 address space&quot; even acquire meaning? The purpose on an IP address is to name a system on the internet such that you can send packets to it. WTF does that have to do with geography? (Apart from the fact that you might generally want to aggregate geographically close systems into contiguous address ranges in order to keep routing tables managable, but that obviously has exactly zero to do with borders of countries and stuff like that, and more with the physics of signal propagation ...)

I read somewhere that MIT or Stanford have more IP addresses than China or Africa. Perhaps there is an option to buy those?

I understand that there are really no other options, but this is a pretty bad place to be in. It doesn&#x27;t sound like Azure can make any hard guarantees that this issue will go away, only that it will be &quot;alleviated.&quot; That wouldn&#x27;t make me feel good as a customer.

Why can&#x27;t they move to IPv6?

This kinda leads me ask. Why don&#x27;t we start allocating the E-Block? I know its a shitty solution and IPv6 would be better, but isn&#x27;t that a short term bandage?

So I guess the next step is to buy the remaining African address space?