Africa's push toward IPv6 cannot bypass IPv4 scarcity, as uneven infrastructure, market dynamics, and governance disputes raise costs, entrench inequality, and risk turning transitional address shortages into a lasting brake on digital development across regions.
Fifteen years after IPv4 exhaustion, a transfer market has reallocated scarce address space, enabling internet growth, despite uneven registry policies, opaque fees, and lingering resistance to a system that proved more pragmatic than planned reclamation.
Regional Internet registries, built for coordination, now sit atop scarce IPv4 assets while bearing little liability, suppressing capitalization and imposing "double extraction" that weakens operators, distorts markets and threatens the stability of global internet uniqueness.
AWS has quietly acquired nine million more IPv4 addresses, turning internet scarcity into strategic leverage. As hyperscalers consolidate dwindling supply worldwide, IPv4 is evolving from legacy protocol into a profitable infrastructure moat for cloud giants.
The Internet has evolved from a scarcity-driven system into one defined by abundance, reshaping infrastructure, governance, and economic models while challenging long-held assumptions about addressing, network roles, and the future of protocol design.
The shift to IPv6 has escalated into a matter of national security, as nations lagging in adoption are increasingly exposed to cyber threats and diminished control over their digital infrastructure due to the limited availability of IPv4. With IPv6-only environments becoming more common, reliance on IPv4 may lead to slower connectivity, deepening the digital divide and potentially worsening economic disparities. In this geopolitical landscape, moving to IPv6 serves as a critical step toward maintaining digital independence.
The Christmas Goat attracted 809 unique AS numbers this year, with IPv6 usage led by the USA and Finland. Despite a rise to 39% IPv6 adoption, challenges like outdated routers persist. As this 15-year tradition concludes, the holiday Goat highlights the progress and hurdles of IPv6 integration.
CLAT/NAT64 is utilized across many mobile networks globally, and I am only talking about Ethernet and Wi-Fi in home and small office/home office (SOHO) environments. I experimented by completely disabling IPv4 at home and established a SSID where my MacBook Pro operates without an actual IPv4 address. The MacBook supports CLAT (RFC 6877), and by implementing PREF64 (RFC 8781) and DHCP Option 108 (RFC 8925) in my network, I was able to achieve a 100% IPv6 environment.
The IPv4 market has created serious interest in the protocol far beyond the natural confines of networking professionals. These assets are worth a lot. Marketplaces, IPv4.Global's especially, have grown to be large centers of asset transfer by buyers and sellers of IPv4 addresses. IPv4.Global has helped transfer over $1 billion in IPv4 blocks.
A new year and a new goat with new conditions, the goat was slowly eaten by jackdaws, and in the end, almost only the frame remained. This was really slow TV for the devastation… You can read more on Wikipedia about the devastating jackdaws and the straw... 36% IPv6 is equal to last year, and I had high hopes as Telia (AS3301) has made great progress in IPv6 and that Sweden should be the dominant country.