India: 47M

China: 358M

Both countries have roughly the same population. The IPv4 problem has been swept under the rug with CGNAT and a normal person doesn't even notice it. But it sucks. Forget having a dedicated IP, even on a broadband connection, you don't get a public IP that's truly yours. According to IPInfo[1], there are around 1,000 users sharing my IP. I get flagged for malicious activity, and online gaming is impossible without a Tailscale relay.

Of course, much of this comes down to the bad luck (+ policies) of developing late, when most IPv4 blocks had already been allocated. But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks they'll probably never fully use, and may never sell. Meanwhile I am sharing a single public IP with a thousand strangers.

[1]: https://ipinfo.io/223.233.77.184

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

China mandates IPv6. So does the US, but the US drags their feet. Meanwhile in Europe it's near universal even though not mandated and no v4 shortage.

> But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks

Maybe Apple and Ford, but it's more than fair that DoD has large blocks since they created ipv4 to connect themselves to other networks. It was only 10 years ago that the US government decided to give up control of IANA.

s/IP/IPv4/g

Configuring my OS to prefer IPv6 addresses of DNS responses significantly reduced the number of web captchas I see (on NAT444 with native IPv6).

IPv4 is old and broken, use IPv6.

> "India: 47M

> "China: 358M

> "Both countries have roughly the same population"

To save anyone else curious from looking it up - their populations are about 1.4 billion (1400 million) each.

Wow I didn’t know CGNAT was a thing for home users.

A lot of the original /8 holders have sold off chunks to AWS and other cloud providers.

End users do notice CGNAT when their internet voice/video calls keep dropping for no apparent reason.

Most people don't care about a private IP, which is why they cost about $20-$25 each (which would be about $2 a year to finance). I've used Airtel in the past and they certainly offer a dedicated IP. Currently I'm with TATA and Vodafone in India

Indeed a shared IP is arguably a benefit in that it makes fingerprinting harder.

If your ISP had customers who were interested it could spend $150k on a /19 block giving 8000 IPv4 addresses and charge an extra ₹100 a month for them and after two years it would be in profit.

In fact I think Jio and Airtel offer static IPs for residential use for something like ₹300 a month, which given how cheap IPv4 addresses are is a massive money spinner, but I have't spoken to anyone living in India about ISPs for a couple of years.

Yep. And, insult to injury, the /4's and /8's of little-unused IPv4 special-use addresses - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv4#Special-use_addresses

[dead]