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Comment by tester34 | Hacker News Reader

do Departament of Defense of US and some schools still own a lot of IPs?

Yes, but what's also interesting is other large IPv4 block holders who aren't governments. Will large public companies start selling off their address space to pad profits in order to appease/please shareholders?

I think organisations like DoD and schools should be force to give it to the pool if they aren't using significant part of those addresses.

How are you going to "force" legacy address holders to give up their space? Especially government agencies, which helped to build the early internet? Early registrations, pre-dating ARIN and the other registries, are basically property. You don't even get charged for them unless you sign a "legacy registration agreement."

DOD-NET essentially uses their space as RFC 1918 space, they have never announced it.

Property, in many cases, this one included, should be bound to making actual use of it.

Some of nets (25/8, the CGNAT space) are essentially so established as private-equivalent, they should just be officially declared private. Connectivity to these will forever be spotty now that they made their way into corporate networks.

True, though a few months back, a ton of DOD space started being announced.

See https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/penta...

That’s a good way to suddenly get those organizations to magically start using those IPs suddenly - if you threaten to take unused IP blocks away, I’m sure those orgs will somehow find a way to “use” them.

We used up 256 /8 blocks in roughly three decades. That's roughly 9 per year. Even if we are more conservative now, freeing up a /8 here or there will not significantly change the situation. 32 bits are woefully inadequate no matter how you slice them.

They're using them, just not very efficiently. There are already rules forcing you to give up unused blocks (although they do not apply to some very old ones).

This is already happening; a lot of the old class A blocks have been split up and sold off.

Yes. But also, some companies have started using these networks as private space because historically, it has never been announced.

Reassigning this space would probably be a worse experience for whoever it is assigned to than those that started using the network internally too.

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