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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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?

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