The tone is unnecessarily alarmist. IPv4 address exhaustion might limit internet growth, but it will not cause the internet as it already exists to break suddenly. Adjustments have been made and will continue to be made, such as corporate use of non-routable subnets for internal machines and a market for unused addresses. While address exhaustion is a serious issue that still must be dealt with in the next few years, the sky is not falling.
Or rather, the sky is falling, but it's still high enough up, and descending slowly enough, that we have plenty of time for a gradual and orderly transition to .. uh, I guess this is where the metaphor breaks down.
In some ways this is worse because it will give time to implement half-measures like ISP-level NAT rather than forcing the adoption of a proper solution like v6. Over time, the price of an IP address will rise and end users will effectively be paying an artificial scarcity tax just to get connected without realizing that there is absolutely no reason for a shortage to exist.
IPv4 address exhaustion might limit internet growth, but it will not cause the internet as it already exists to break suddenly.
If the routing table grows too fast (eg, due to fragmentation of the available address space) there is a very real chance that the internet as it currently exists will break suddenly for some users.
Not that IPv6 fixes this automatically -- it grows the routing table as well -- but v4 fragmentation does cause very real problems. You can't just pick addresses up of the floor and put them to use. Each routed block carries a very real and marginal cost for all those globally who service that route.
Until you can't create a machine on EC2 because Amazon has run out of addresses. Obviously they will have been buying companies to asset strip IPs first.
