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Comment by Sebguer | Hacker News Reader

IP addresses were intended to be a public good. The fact that AWS has monopolized so many of them, and now that they own a significant fraction of them is deciding to charge for them. It's ridiculous.

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So far as I'm aware IP addresses exist out of a functional need, not a moral imperative, but if you have a source with regards to that I'd love to read it. You can hardly call the number of IPv4 addresses that AWS has a monopoly either, iirc they have something like 2% of the IPv4 space? Not charging for them was comparatively strange given that other cloud providers have been charging for them for a good long while. Managing their address space isn't a zero cost endeavor for AWS, so why wouldn't they charge for it? At the least to cover their costs, but given the way the world works these days making a profit isn't weird or unexpected either.

If you're really upset about it you can go through the trouble of registering your own ASN and get on the list to get your own allocation from ARIN. No one is stopping you from doing so.

I think there's an enormous number of things that it's very worth criticizing AWS (and other cloud providers) for, but this really isn't one of them in my book.

> So far as I'm aware IP addresses exist out of a functional need, not a moral imperative, but if you have a source with regards to that I'd love to read it.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16792306/fcc-net-neutral...

"For Licklider, this wasn’t just a new technology, but a new way for human beings to exist in the world."

Are we talking about IPv4 addresses or are we talking about the internet as a whole? Because that quote seems to be about the latter and I was referring to the former above. I read the Licklider paper that they link and it's much more on the abstract side rather than discussing actual implementation details.

Licklider and Taylor did have some very interesting predictions about how the internet would shape up though. Probably my favorite quote from the article:

"Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever, for consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the network’s software to all the new generations of computer, coming closer and closer upon the heels of their predecessors until the entire population of the world is caught up in an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging."

Then don't use AWS and discourage others from using AWS.

I guess that might also include all Amazon businesses if you really want to try to send a message, not that it'd really hurt Amazon that much if more people don't actually follow through with going to alternatives.

Or you can complain about it with no results or actions.

> IP addresses were intended to be a public good.

Were they though? The first few blocks auctioned off all went to large tech institutions

The Internet was designed by hippies and IP addresses weren't auctioned in the old days; they were given for free. When IPv4 runout was in sight the hippies argued loudly that addresses should be rationed instead of sold.

It might be right to call Jon Postel a hippie, but Vint Cerf sports a three piece suit. The Internet was designed by DARPA contractors and university grad students, so it’s a bit of a weird mix.

Yes, see my reply to the other commenter above.

>IP addresses were intended to be a public good.

Then it was a pretty poor idea to have less IPs than humans on the planet.

We have IPv6 which, at least for the time being can give every individual a few zillion IPs. Providers like this just need to get them rolled out.

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