Author here. I kind of doubt it. Copied from a comment earlier:

I doubt we'd have picked 27-bit addresses. That's about 134M addresses; that's less than the US population (it's about the number of households today?) and Europe was also relevant when IPv4 was being designed. In any case, if we had chosen 27-bit addresses, we'd have hit exhaustion just a bit before the big telecom boom that built out most of the internet infrastructure that holds back transition today. Transitioning from 27-bit to I don't know 45-bit or 99-bit or whatever we'd choose next wouldn't be as hard as the IPv6 transition today.

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bawolff 6 days ago | parent [-]

IPv4 was designed in 1981. The idea of every household in america having a computer in 1981 probably would have sounded insane. According to google there was only 213 hosts on the internet in 1981.

	▲	ajuc 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In early 00s my university in Poland had all computers at the campus connected to the internet with public IPs :) Thousands of computers - every lab, every room at dormitories and some for public use standing at the corridors at campus, all with unique public IPs cause they had so many :) I think they had 19 bits of IP addresses available or sth crazy like that :) They were one of the institutions introducing internet in Poland back in 90s, so they had a huge portion of the addresses assigned and kept them.
	▲	pavpanchekha 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Your argument can't be so strong as to imply that IPv4 should actually have used 24-bit addresses, though.