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I wonder how much ICMP is going to those IPs. I ping 1.0.0.1 ("ping 1.1") as a quick check to ensure my internet is working a lot, far quicker and less stretching than typing ping 8.8.8.8. When I'm tracing a fault I'll ping 1.1.1.x as I can then tcpdump on a spanport against that IP and be fairly confident any traffic is from my test point and not from another device.

I'm sure I'm not the only one.

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funny that you mention it but most technically minded Germans I know (maybe outside of people spending their days with datacenter stuff) habitually use `ping heise.de` (of c't and ix print magazine fame), which seems to have been a thing since the 90s. It's usually fast, you can really count on it being up and still around.

I even remember them once writing about having such an unusually high volume of ICMP traffic that they had to divert that traffic to a dedicated box at some point.

I'd suspect a huge amount of IoT devices continually test their network connection by pinging these well known IPs.

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