Since Amazon is about to start charging an arm and a leg for IPv4 addresses, many have begun talking about the imminent migration to ipv6, which won't happen because ISPs still haven't budged an inch as regards actually implementing this. What's more likely is that everyone will raise prices and enjoy monopoly profits rather than upgrading decrepit routing equipment.

What's worst about this situation is that the entire problem is unnecessary in the era of ubiquitous gigabit internet. Suppose you need directions to 612 Wharf Avenue. You simply consult a map, and note down "right on dulles, left on crenshaw..." until you get to the destination. This only has to be done once, and reversed on the return trip. This is essentially how BGP works under the hood.

So the question arises: Why do we have glorified phone numbers passed in every IP packet? Performance and cost. Encoding down into a bag of 4 or 16 bytes is less work than reading 253 bytes (max for a domain name). But let's be real, it's not much less work, especially if we adopt jumbo frames by default. This is fully in the realm of "hurl more hardware & bandwidth at the problem".

The benefits to doing so are huge. You whack an entire layer of abstraction; DNS translation alone adds more latency than the overhead of passing these names in every packet. Much like how the Telcos whacked the POTS network and now emulate it over SIP, you could emulate the v4 system where needed and move on. Self-Hosted DNS (delegation) would still be possible; just like now you ultimately have to have A records for your nameserver(s) with your registrar or ISP. They would adapt the means they already use for IPs to map their own internal network topology. This scheme would have the added benefit of being able to do away with PTR records entirely.

The prospects for this happening anytime soon are quite grim, as I've never even heard anyone discuss how obviously unnecessary the IP -> DNS abstraction layer is. More's the pity; get yourself a /24 while you can.