Journalists write these articles and provide no context.

What Lily Hay Newman should’ve explained is that public IPv4 addresses are handed out by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. They generally issue blocks of IP addresses to large corporations and ISPs.

This is what has been exhausted. There are no more of these large blocks remaining to assign to Level 3 or Cogent or IBM.

These large companies further subdivide IP address blocks for various purposes. For instance usually when I’ll set up a company that uses for example Cogent as an ISP, I’ll request a /28 block. This means I’ll get a contiguous block of 16 public IP addresses, 14 of which are usable*. It’ll look something like this: 173.65.128.16/28.

These IPv4 addresses have not run out. Believe me if you request a block of IP addresses from Cogent, you’re gonna get ’em as long as you pay the money.

Eventually however ISPs and other large companies will run out of these IP addresses to issue. But contrary to what you’ve heard that is not likely to happen soon and even if it does, there are ways around it.

Also there are a lot of companies that hoard ridiculously-sized /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses. That’s 16,777,216 addresses. These were issued before it was known the internet would explode in popularity and now these corporations refuse to return these blocks to be re-issued. They should be forced to, in my opinion.

If these /8 blocks were to be returned, it’d ease the IPv4 address scarcity problems for a good while.

Anyway, IPv6 hasn’t been widely adopted mainly because it is a huge piece of crap designed by engineers clueless about nearly everything.

Here’s what an IPv4 address looks like: 10.100.50.20

Easy. Not too bad to remember.

Here’s what an IPv6 address looks like: 2001:db8:100:f101:210:a4ff:fee3:9566

Get all that? Yeah, me neither. And I have actually used IPv6 in the real world. (And it sucks.)

But to get back to the main point, IPv4 addresses are indeed in short supply. But not in the way you’ve been told and it’s not some huge danger that threatens us all, and there are things we could do to mitigate the problem if we wanted to.

*Really good network engineers will know that I am not being entirely accurate here.