While inflation is always sad to see, this one change has a valid reason behind it: we’re running out of IPv4 addresses, and charging money for them is the best economic incentive to get everyone to switch to IPv6.
Here’s a quick history lesson: IPv4 was developed by DARPA in 1981 as a way to address devices within their military-focused computer network. As a simple 32-bit representation, addreses were efficiently represented in the CPUs of the time, and the theoretical limit of how many computers you could connect together was a crazy, implausible number like 4.3 billion devices. The US military, and indeed every one of their contractors and partners, would never ever see 4.3 billion computers connecting to one network, especially in 1981 (where owning a single computer was a luxury reserved for “important” research).
Fast forward to the current era of the Internet of things, where connecting 4.3 billion devices together has become not only a reality, but a problem: we have more than 4.3 billion things connected to the Internet, so we started to use tricks like NAT to hide more than one device behind a single address. Time is still running out though, and I fully suppport charging hosting operators for IPv4 use. This can only lead to more pressure on ISPs to support IPv6, until everyone is on IPv6. Assuming the address space is managed properly, IPv6 can uniquely address every atom on the surface of the Earth with 100 different addresses.
And atom-sized computers don’t exist, so we’re probably okay until we start colonizing the galaxy, in which case the 270,000,000,000 ms ping (even to the closest stars like Proxima Centauri) might become a bigger issue.