That cost will continuously rise up until migration to ipv6 comes out cheaper and enables access to the developing market as well. At which point it is a business no brainer.
Short .com domains actually have an intrinsic value to their prospective owners though, since the domain is the human-readable address, and a shorter address is more memorable to customers. The version of the underlying network protocol is just an implementation detail that the vast majority of companies (basically everyone besides possibly 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8) would happily drop if it became totally unnecessary.
Just like IPX. It's still necessary and in use for some things -- so it hasn't reached its end of life -- but when was the last time you ever thought about it?
By this metric, we still haven't finished migrating to v4.
True. I could see a world where IPv4 is only for legacy, internal systems and it is not routed externally, but that feels like decades away. There would need to be a coordinated effort of major ISPs to turn it off, but why would that happen if people are willing to pay for it?
I have no doubt there's an internal application running on a Novell server somewhere that we'll never hear about. It's still running on a machine in a closet just like it was in 1997, or possibly imaged and migrated to a VM because nobody wanted to touch it.
It’s impossible to finish a transition when the old version has no end of life in sight.