For lease: IPv4 addresses, slightly used but in working order
The issue of how the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses has been around since the 1990s. And yet it is claimed that almost 20% of the potential pool of 4.3 billion addresses are available for lease.
IPv4, the connective protocol that runs the internet, dates back to the early 1980s when the Net was still ARPANet and had a few thousand domains at best. At the time, the 32-bit addressing of TCP/IP and its 4.3 billion potential addresses was more than enough.
Then came commercialization of the Internet, mobile devices, and finally IoT, accelerating the problem. IPv6 with its 340 undecillion addresses was developed and launched in the late 1990s but adoption has been slow for myriad of reasons we won’t go into here.