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Comment by vonseel | Hacker News Reader

Pretty amazing that a single company can own an entire block of IP space, if I understand this correctly. Approx how many addresses is this?

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I used to work for HP and someone explained to me a select few companies got /8's when the internet was still young. HP got one, Compaq had one which HP now also owns. I was basically told if you had a /8 you didn't give it up because of how valuable and rare they now are (this was around 2010, too). GE, Kodak, Apple, and Microsoft were a few other names that came up in that discussion as well.

GE actually sold their entire 3.0.0.0/8 block off to AWS a few years ago.

It's a little awkward since a lot of internal software is still configured to whitelist all access from that space since it was a constant for so long.

We called this threxit internally. (Get it? Three dot exit? ;))

And as far as I know we haven’t stopped threxiting — at least they hadn’t when I left. It turns out unwinding IT systems that have had stable IP addresses for 30+ years in a year or two is tricky business.

I wonder what became of the Kodak block? Seems GE would find more use/investment for IP space than a failed film company (IIRC)...

Funny enough the highest price point for IP ranges is somewhere between /16 and /24, IIRC.

You can count how many companies need and will be willing to pay 8-9 figures for a /8 without getting to your toes. And subnetting it and selling it to maximize returns is hard work.

But if you’re sitting on a /21? That’ll move before you can count how many IPs are in the block ;)

Why are they so valuable?

Because there are only four billion addresses all in all. Every device that wants to be reachable on the Internet needs one. These days, mobile devices don't get a public address anymore and there are all sorts of complications due to it.

We're slowly transitioning to a new scheme with ample address space. But to nobody's surprise it's taking decades longer than envisioned.

Hopefully it's surprising to the envisioner(s)!

I assume it was willful optimism on the part of the envisioners. If you tell people it will take decades it will take even longer!

Map: https://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/census-map/ima...

(a bit dated, but shows the historic allocations)

Look up "CIDR", history thereof, for reasons why it looks this way.

Crazy how wasteful it is. I wonder what genius thought to allocate /8 to every company/organization. You don't need to have PhD in statistics and math to know there's more than 250 companies.

I wonder who will think about the genius who disbanded the EPA, rolled back every environmental protection there is and withdrew from the Paris Agreement at the most critical time for our planet in 40 years.

Hindsight is 20/20 and the „Internet“ was a mainly US centered university research project that was thought of as a toy by the far majority.

Everybody thought they‘d have a replacement for the initial assignment once things got serious... for more fun, google ipv6 history ^^

Wouldn't the more apt comparison be to the folks who set up the EPA in the first place (Nixon administration I believe)?

Maybe take a dose of humility and realize that at one point the fastest processors and memory systems in the world weren't capable of holding more than a limited size routing table, while maintaining acceptable line speed?

And that in the interests of working within the physical hardware limitations of the day, very smart engineers made the best choices they could?

Jesus.

What this has to do with anything? I'm saying that giving whole /8 (or I should say class A) to a company is wasteful. And you can only do it no more than a bit over 200 times. You are on the other hand saying that the hardware at the time wouldn't be able to handle all the companies. Why not allocate C blocks, or at very least B blocks? Or are you saying that they doubted hardware of the future would be capable of handling it?

Because of such wasteful allocation we got this "wonderful" thing called NAT which basically killed most of innovation in area of networking and IPv6 which is taking over 20 years to adapt, because most ISPs hold to IPv4 as long as they can because making this switch requires some work.

Well, same thing for the geniuses that made IPs 32 bit when even MACs are 48 bit.

Or, if my networking trainer at a Cisco course is to be believed, the geniuses that made IPv6 subnets contains 65k hosts at a minimum, when due to ARP requests all traffic would be dead at that scale.

Wow, this is very cool! Thank you.

The post office has/had one

The DOD has like 5 or 6!

well since DoD started the whole Internet thingy that's not that surprising, but yeah they were extra wasteful.

Loop back address, 127.0.0.1, is really a class A block, 127.0.0.0/8, that only uses 1 address

You can use anything from that block as well and there are situations where you might want a different loopback address or multiple loopback addresses. /8 of the public address space is massively excessive though.

16.7 million or so.

IPv4 is a 32 bit address space, so it tops out around 4.2 billion total.

17.0.0.0/8 is locking down the first 8 bits, giving 2^(32-8) variable bits, or there are only 256 possible first octets and this is one so it’s 1/256th of 4.2 billion addresses.

It’s even more when you factor in link local and private network ranges.

Everybody has those for themselves.

That’s what I’m saying. The set of addresses allocated to Apple (in their /8) is an even larger ratio as the private ranges don’t count towards the denominator.

Apple has a /8 of IPv4 space (plus a couple other small allocations: https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/APPLEC-1-Z/nets ), which contains 16777216 addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

Well that should just be about enough for each customer on Apple iWeb Cloud Services to have their own ip address once it gets started.. :')

It's a /8, which is 2^(32 - 8) = 16.7 million address.

The entire 32.0.0.0 used to be owned by a company that provided IT services to the Norwegian public sector. They had 4 IPs for every citizen in the country, and change.

Desktop, laptop, phone and tablet. Damn, ran out of IPs for the XBOX.

You could (and should) do that with IPv6. Down with NAT! :)

Network address, gateway, one usable IP address, broadcast address :-)

This map was drawn 13 years ago so it's heavily out of date but it does illustrate the companies that got their ip /8 blocks back the day (Ford?!) https://xkcd.com/195/

Ford, Prudential, Halliburton, USPS, Department of Social Security of UK. Someone must have been really high when deciding this.

BTW: this one is better: https://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/census-map/ima...

Won't every vehicle soon have its own IP address? Many must have them already. IoT means some devices need multiple IP addresses

Ford was assigned it's netblock in 1988. It was definitely not assigned with IoT in mind. And if they deployed IoT today, they would just use the mobile telco's dynamic IP addresses and communicate through HTTP.

There are many of them (obviously not very many) - Universities, too iirc. Most have divested by now.

It correlates strongly with big organizations who were "into" networking early on.

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