New transfer data suggests IPv4's apparent decline has reversed as record trading, rising prices, infrastructure demand and tightening supply reveal a market driven by deployment rather than speculation once again despite accelerating IPv6 adoption globally.
NANOG 97 revealed how AI is reshaping network infrastructure, from lossless data centre fabrics and optical limits to surging investment, while exposing unresolved questions about geolocation, IPv6 adoption and Internet operations in an AI-driven era.
After two years of falling prices, the IPv4 market has turned decisively. Surging transfer volumes, AI infrastructure demand and looming broadband expansion are tightening supply, pushing prices higher and leaving patient buyers facing a costlier reality.
Jan Žorž reflects on SEE RIPE's role in uniting a fragmented region, where trust built through informal exchange now underpins internet resilience and helps align engineers with policymakers as regulatory pressures intensify.
LACNIC's LAC-2025-5 proposal formalises IPv4 sub-assignments, bringing grey-market leasing into a framework, easing scarcity pressures, improving registry accuracy, and lowering barriers for smaller providers while preserving incentives to adopt IPv6, across Latin America and Caribbean.
As governments, firms and engineers reshape networks, the internet is fragmenting into rival systems. Interoperability erodes, raising costs, curbing rights and weakening resilience, with global growth, innovation and cooperation increasingly at risk.
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.