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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't the US defence department hold a ridiculous amount of the address space? What would it take for them to give some of that up?

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The growth in internet-connected devices is exponential. By the time the last blocks were issued they were going out at 1 class A (i.e. 1/256 of the entire IPv4 address space) every month. So it's not worth the effort to recover existing addresses.

iirc they were using more than a /8 every month at the end of apnics lot (also cidr is a more useful notation)

Why bother? The switch needs to be made eventually, so why kick the can down the road?

Because places like Qatar are suffering as a result of the US and others dragging their feet.

As pointed out in another comment, the situation in Qatar is a political one, not one of a situation where they could only get one IPv4 address.

Qatar suffers as a result of Qatar's policies and laws.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addres...

Looks like they've got more than one /8. ARIN has been trying to get the holders of legacy space to sign new SLAs and to get them to give over some of the space, but considering the IP address market, why not just sell the space instead?

There are a ton of what are called "legacy" assignments -- to DoD, .edu's, etc. By policy, ARIN can't take those back, even if they aren't being used.

Entire /8s wouldn't last a single month at current demand (and demand is only going to continue to increase), while consolidating usage to free up the /8 would take many times that long.

It's simply not worth the time and cost for such a short-lived bandaid.

http://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/census-map/imag...

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