IPv4 Declared Historic – Draft
I know it pains neckbeards to hear this, but IPv4 is not going anywhere, as long as it remains in the business interests of major cloud providers, and as long as people continue to deploy NAT based firewalls as a security feature.<p>Re: business interests: Cloud businesses can acquire IP addresses at price points far higher than the average developer can. Now that the ARIN address space is exhausted, cloud providers will begin to buy more and more IPv4 space until they have a complete monopoly and large portions of IPv4 are controlled by just a few companies. This will price other companies out of offering cloud services that are IPv4 compatible.<p>Re: security: Sure, the original intended purpose of NAT was not security, but people <i>use</i> it for that, and will continue to do so. If you want to put multiple boxes behind a single IP address, IPv4 is the easiest way to do it. In fact, IPv6 seems to be a step <i>backward</i> in terms of security. Every device does not need to be openly addressable from anywhere on the Internet, and developers will always choose the path of least resistance, especially when it&#x27;s more secure.