Cloud giant AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from next year, claiming it is forced to do this because of the increasing scarcity of these and to encourage the use of IPv6 instead.
The update will come into effect on February 1, 2024, when AWS customers will see a charge of $0.005 (half a cent) per IP address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses. … These charges will apply to all AWS services including EC2, Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) nodes, and will apply across all AWS regions, the company said.
I suspect greed is involved. But since the new allocation of ipv4 hasn’t been possible for quite some time in US and Europe. I think the price of those IPs that are assigned to providers is going to gradually rise.
And to think, I remember when I got a business ISDN account for my old office. They pretty much just gave you a free (well included in the price) /24 without even asking.
Different times.
I mean, I see it being a little bit greedy, but honestly?
My entire life I’ve seen nothing but rent-seeking from giant corporations in most things except this.
IPv4 is essentially super limited in terms of “available land” (read: IPs) on which to develop. In the real world, when land is scarce, the cost of the land goes up dramatically. I mean, really, that goes for any resource that is limited. The more limited the resource, the higher price it demands.
Only in internet-land has a limited resource that is widely used has not been attached to rent-seeking behavior. Honestly, the current price seems (to me, personal opinion) to be very reasonable, considering the low number of IPv4 IP addresses available.
So, considering it took so long to charge for them, unlikely just driven by greed, imho.