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Comment by aanfhn | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone mind sharing how IP addresses are allocated and bought in the first place? Like who did GE buy it from if it wasn't another company?

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In the very early days no one understood that over half of all humans would be on the internet. It was just this ARPANet thing for the military and universities, then a few big companies.

So you got a /8 by asking for one; they handed them out for free.

Same goes for DNS. You used to request the name and it was yours. No yearly fees.

The IP blocks were never reclaimed because it was pointless. Even now clawing back the big /8 assignments only kicks the can down the road for a year, maybe two.

And oddly enough, this seems to be happening all over again with ipv6.

My company has a /32 ipv6 space. That's 79228162514264337593543950336 /128s. And we got it by... just asking for it.

I know everyone's shouting about "there are enough IPs for every atom on earth!" but just like "no one understood that over half of all humans would be on the internet", maybe we'll need more IPs in the future becuase of some unforeseen development... it seems silly to be handing out blocks like this just for giggles.

That seems wasteful, but that is the equivalent to getting a single IPv4 address by asking for it, and the IPv4 shortage wasn't caused by the distribution of individual addresses. It's a world of difference to getting a /8 by asking for it.

We would still have ipv4 shortage that way though, not enough to give one to everyone, let alone the several we need. Same here, this might seem a crazy problem to worry about, but they're handing out ranges of size large enough that there isn't enough to give one to any person alive.

Yeah, we can only give out 4,294,967,295 more /32s to large companies.

So to take a known scale, there is not enough to give one to each person alive. Which might seem crazy but then again, why would everyone not only need an ipv4, but need several (phone, computers, watch, tv,...)? Crazy

People start encoding information in IPv6 addresses because the address space is so huge. This however, could lead to address shortage.

There was an article about this recently on the German news site Heise: https://heise.de/-4196981

Translation: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

They thought of that; the current allocation scheme will be used for IIRC only 1/8 of the IPv6 address space. If that's ever exhausted, there's still the other 7/8 which can be allocated in a more conservative manner.

Apparently not for every atom. The space is small enough to save us from grey goo scenario, at least until nanobots invent NAT.

https://xkcd.com/865/

I believe it's more like every atom in the universe. Which means that inherently it is enough. But indeed it is still best to be somewhat careful.

There were always yearly fees; it's just that prior to 1995 they were paid for by the US taxpayers instead of the domain owners.

Those literally weren't fees. The dictionary definition of fee is "a payment made to a professional person or to a professional or public body in exchange for advice or services".

Hence, there were no fees. Stop engaging in pointless (and even incorrect!) sophistry.

Those literally were indeed fees.

The National Science Foundation paid Network Solutions a payment, per registered domain, in exchange for the service of registering it.

IP-Addresses and domain-names are only tangentially related. Just because you pay a fee per domain-name does not mean it's the same for network addresses.

My comment is addressed at "Same goes for DNS. You used to request the name and it was yours. No yearly fees."

Sorry. Didn't catch the context.

> Originally a file named HOSTS.TXT was manually maintained and made available via file sharing by Stanford Research Institute for the ARPANET membership, containing the hostnames and address of hosts as contributed for inclusion by member organizations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file)

And where do you think the money to pay the ARPANET contracts came from?

Well, in case anyone was wondering, the answer is US taxpayers: http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x07

Definition 1.1: "Money paid as part of a special transaction, for example for a privilege or for admission to something." I'd say that applies.

The cost to run the DNS servers was fixed (and mostly still is, at least compared to the money raked in by registration fees).

That's both untrue and irrelevant to this discussion.

The IANA was responsible for assigning IP addresses back then. It was basically one dude, Jon Postel( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel ), until it was formalized as an organization in 1988.

s/basically one/one amazing/

The foundational work he did was definitely impressive. But the fact that it fell to one guy also spoke to how low the stakes were at the time.

I researched it, and I don't have the specifics in front of me, but it looked like a massive corporate giveaway.

Perhaps it didn't feel like it as much at the time, since only huge corporations had the need for so many computers.

Companies like Merck and Ford, Universities like MIT, don't appear to have paid a dime for them.

Back then I don't think anyone ever considered we'd use up the IPv4 address space and/or assumed that the migration to IPv6 would happen more more quickly, rendering IPv4 obsolete. It looks like most of the big blocks were all assigned prior to widespread consumer internet adoption.

Back then IPv6 wasn't planned at all. By the time the need for more address space was realized, v4 addresses were already a valued commodity and no longer given away on request.

It's worth noting that at the time for the value of an IP address block was pretty much 0.

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