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Comment by nickthemagicman | Hacker News Reader

Why does the federal government STILL have control over 6% of the internet IP's?

Edit: added the word still. I know the history but that was like 20 years or more ago.

Why did they still have so much IP space?

"The internet", in the sense of the big TCP/IP v4 network we know today, was a DARPA-funded enhancement to the original ARPANET.

The Pentagon owns a big chunk of the internet because the Pentagon paid for the internet, basically. The more interesting bit is how much it they gave away for free, not how much it kept.

We paid for the internet. The Pentagon is paid for by taxes.

Alright, and the "we" you refer to still technically own those addresses.

But why? after all these years why did they still have those?

It’s a strategic asset. The same reason there are giant collections of old military planes out in the desert. You never know when you might need it.

I wondered about those lately. Do you happen to know if they are really in a state to make them flightworthy again if push came to shove?

I would have expected them to have deteriorated to a point where restoring them becomes a bigger effort than building new planes.

It's a dry climate and aluminum doesn't just rot. It would obviously take some money and work to bring planes out of mothballs, and probably in some cases unrepairable damage would be discovered, but I would expect most of the planes to successfully reactivate if the need was great enough. Those that couldn't be reactivated could be cannibalized for spare parts.

Consider that the Iowa class battleships spent some decades deactivated, sitting in salt water, before being reactivated several times.

They know what they're doing. But there aren't really old planes in the boneyard now. 1980s vintage and later plus a few muesum pieces that haven't been towed to the museum yet. The oddest thing out there is the tooling to make B1-B airframes.

Why does anyone have an IP address? To use them.

6% of the IPV4 space?

The same reason Apple, Ford, and Bell Labs still have giant blocks — they got in at the beginning when allocation of 4 billion addresses seemed like a non-problem, and haven’t sold out.

https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-add...

Holy moly, Apple owns all of 17 . * . * . * (workaround for HN formatting)? Wow. That's over 16 million IP addresses. Fun.

Apple at least is a major IT company, but Ford!

They needed IP addresses for all their computers. ;-)

CIDR notation is how you notate these; Apple owns 17.0.0.0/8; the /8 meaning "8 bits identify the network portion", so just the first octet, or the 17.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing...

Coincidentally, CIDR doesn't conflict with the HN comment syntax.

Sometimes shortened to 17/8, but… I wouldn't recommend that.

> Sometimes shortened to 17/8

This isn't Ipv6! :P

Use \*: 17.*.*.*

This is already old news, the current who's who in the network is related to IPv6

You bet everybody already jumped in that boat. It would be interesting to know who and how.

I think I found a way for the USPS to fund the pensions for all their future yet-to-be-born workers…

Because the internet originated from a federal government project. The federal government of the USA also owns 28% of the land in the USA, means it owns 1.7% of the total land on earth.

Also, early owners got huge allocations. And the US government is an early owner.

Do you like this state of affairs having such a massive federal govt?

Because they paid to create it initially and have yet to sell their address space. There are some great stories early on that break down to: “Why are all these civilians on our network?”

It used to have control over 100% of them, so this is a big improvement.

To address your edit, they still do because it doesn’t really matter. We have mitigated IPv4 exhaustion with NAT, and IPv6 adoption is still growing. No one cares enough to try to do anything about it.

If you made a list of “most popular concerns about the Internet in 2021,” the size of U.S. federal IP space would be pretty far down.

NAT has problems. It isn't the same as having an IP address.

IPV6 is the solution but has been in adoption forever.

I just don't understand what the government needs with all of those IP addresses and what kind of sneaky stuff it's doing behind the scenes.

It’s not sneaky to own that much address space; just inertia. Remember that the Internet is an outgrowth of ARPANET.

The article was literally referring to some super sneaky stuff.

The internet was created by DARPA.

This can be independently verified by running a reverse DNS lookup, which asks the name server for a magic domain: 1.2.3.4 becomes ”4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa”, which then yields NS records for the actual domains served from that address.

Back when IPv4 was enough for everyone, huge blocks of IPs were granted to corporations and governments.

They use a ton of it. Millions and millions of devices around the globe on a bunch of networks.

Because they can.

Who's going to take it off them?

No because it was first come first served in addition to having sprouted from a government program.

Universities who got on the bandwagon first also tended to have multiple class B addresses.

I know several individuals who have /24's ("class C") blocks, including myself. I always regret not going for the class B. It would've just taken a couple of emails back in 1993.

The first place I was a network admin at they had a /16. I didn't deal with private IPs until I left that company in 2015. Even the printers were on a public IP.

A great answer in the late 70s, what's the reason for holding on to them today?

Possession is 9/10th of the law? They already have them, making it easy for them to keep them.

The highest bidder.. China.

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