True, but I mean, I don't own my own body either I suppose, I am just borrowing its particles from the rest of the universe. That's only a useful distinction to make if you plan on killing me.

My personal situation is probably not very representative of most Internet users or entities interacting with the organizations that control the Internet, but I think as wireless technology improves and end-users' ability and incentive to self-host grows, they will run into the same problems that I do.

Bottom line: I don't want to spend unreasonable amounts of time and money dealing with the idiosyncracies of the Internet Protocol and related technology, when I'm trying to do something that should be easy, like get an IP address that I can move between ISPs and cloud providers, or run an internet service from my home. It just feels incredibly wasteful to have to pay significant amounts of money to rent a number when it should be possible to claim or cheaply register one of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 such numbers.

Then once I nut up and pay for a small slice of the infinitely many numbers available, I have to deal with completely avoidable, godawful technical debt that only exists because the people I'm supposedly paying to govern me were so lazy that they allowed an obvious slow-motion trainwreck to play out with IPv4 over decades. They're still so lazy or cowardly or incompetent that after 20 years IPv6 availability is still only around 50%. Good thing there is an unnecessarily complicated organizational model between ICANN/IANA/RIR so that everybody can point fingers somewhere else.

I don't want to pay for conferences and subcommittees and elaborate ceremonies for electing Vice Treasurers of RIRs, nor do I want to play tamagotchi with ranges of numbers. I just want a fucking number that allows other Internet users to connect with the stuff I put behind that number.

I would prefer a more functional system for acquiring said numbers than one that feels all warm and fuzzy about letting the people profiting off renting numbers elect the leaders of the organizations with the authority to end rentiership of the numbers.

It's not the formal processes and openness I take issue with. IPV4's ubiquity and the damage it does (funneling real money away from all of us towards ISPs) is a failure of governance.

Though in a way it's not. It's failing me, but it wasn't designed to represent me. It's failing our species, but it wasn't designed to represent us. Who do you think it was designed to represent?

The outcome speaks for itself.

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...