Of course everything is a product of its time, and in 1999 or any other world where the Internet is more of a cool new thing than serious business, it makes sense. But that was 26 years ago.

I am pretty sure the guys charging hundreds of dollars for IP addresses that cost them nothing to produce should be able to set up stripe, an identity verification product, and otherwise automate onboarding. Also, instead of writing giant process documents and slow-walking such wildly difficult problems as "allow domains to end in .cool" through infinitely nested committees they could try wielding their supreme governance over Who Owns Numbers And Names by killing off IPv4.

As long as ICANN/IANA remain in charge of Internet governance and operate with >$100mm budgets [0] "it made sense 25 years ago" is not a valid excuse IMO.

[0] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy24-funding-sou...

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jve 3 days ago | parent [-]

Just a little correction per IPv4 wikipedia [1]: Introduction 1981; 44 years ago

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4

	▲	tracker1 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was going to look up the same... I thought it was a little older than that... it's worth remembering that in 1981 there was no DNS yet, and even for dialup BBSes there were only a handful in the entire country as Hayes modems were new that year. Hell, for years a lot of business email services were dialup, grab packets, send packets and read/reply offline. This is the same year the IBM PC was first released, and many people felt that would only see fairly limited sales. It wound up selling over 20x projections. Nobody at the time really thought there would be a need for even more addresses. Not to mention the additional overhead of a wider network on the hardware at the time.