IPv6 Thought Experiment

Wed Oct 2 21:13:12 UTC 2019

> On Oct 2, 2019, at 4:04 PM, Nick Hilliard <nick at foobar.org> wrote:
> 
> Antonios Chariton wrote on 02/10/2019 17:33:
>> What if, globally, and starting at January 1st, 2020, someone (imagine a government or similar, but with global reach) imposed an IPv4 tax. For every IPv4 address on the Global Internet Routing Table, you had to pay a tax. Let’s assume that this can be imposed, must be paid, and cannot be avoided using some loophole. Let’s say that this tax would be $2, and it would double, every 3 or 6 months.
> 
> Interesting idea.  Let's say it started off at $2 / month and doubled every 3 months.  At the end of month 12, it would be $32/month.  After 5 years, we'd be talking about just over $2 million per IP address per month, i.e. a little over half a billion dollars per /24.

What happens when v4 is gone? Surely you won’t let it end there - After all, If you have the ability and infrastructure to do this, why not tax IPv6 too? This would cut down on the number of “undesirables" on the internet by pricing it out of the reach of all but the largest megacorporations. Eventually we can reduce the internet to a few dozen authorized parties in each region and we’ll only need enough IP addresses for those. I can imagine a number of governments around the world would be very interested in this.