20 ms·
Tell HN: Amazon now owns 3.0.0.0/8
Apparently bought in two chunks: 3.0.0.0/9 and 3.128.0.0/9.
Previous owner was GE.
Anecdotal reports across the Internet that AWS EIPs are now being assigned in that range.
https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-3-0-0-0-1.html
https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-3-128-0-0-1.html
- matt_lo 8y agoEventually Amazon is going to rule us all.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoNo doubt. While everyone is looking at Apple, Google and FaceBook, Amazon is back there plotting their take-over.
- jessaustin 8y ago"Eventually", ha.
- eganist 8y agoConsidering GE's downward spiral (www.google.com/search?q=nyse:ge), I wonder if Amazon managed to get a good deal out of it or if GE managed to actually extract some value out of this sale. I can't imagine why sales and values of IP blocks would be publicly tracked (beyond just IP blocks trading hands), but is anyone aware of the sale price?
- matt_lo 8y agoBoth. IPs should appreciate in value because of the limited allocations.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWon't widescale addition of IPv6 crash the price? It's coming any minute now!
- andyidsinga 8y agoI has similar thoughts about the price of ipv4 addrs going down. so , some smart finance people at GE may have calculated that now is a good time to put them on the market vs wait.
- StavrosK 8y agoAnd some smart finance people at Amazon may have calculated that now is a good time to buy them and wait.
- andyidsinga 8y agoI'm sure they've been out hounding the owners for quite some time :)
- softawre 8y agoSo what you're saying is this is good for bitcoin?
- iamgopal 8y agoAmazon should buy GE.
- solarkraft 8y agoThey wouldn't get all that much out of that, I think. It'd also be a lot of work.
- vetinari 8y agoThey would get the expertise to build their own dams to power datacentres ;).
- briffle 8y agoOrder a locomotive, or 5MW Wind Generator with free 2 day shipping with your prime membership..
- Foobar8568 8y agoI would rather have my nuclear plant to power my crypto farm. :o
- ccozan 8y agoBetter dig gold, according to the last news.
- anticensor 8y agoFine print would say free locomotive offer only applies to 1435mm territories.
- anticensor 8y agoAaaand, your locomotive will not move unless your CBTC reports to Alexa network, enabling precise location tracking of these trains
- 8y ago
- akulbe 8y agoI wonder what they got it for? if just for more IPs for AWS stuff, or if it's for something like IoT stuff?
- akulbe 8y agoAlways love getting downvoted for asking a legitimate question. Nice.
- mturmon 8y agoCorrect strategy in the case of early down votes that you think are incorrect is (1) review what you wrote to see if its tone was flame-bait; (2) wait it out quietly until votes equilibrate. Usually something reasonable comes out over time.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoMeh, HN seems to hate questions when they think the questioner isn't genuine: Basically if they wish the answer weren't true. That's been my recent experience anyway. Better suggestion - stop politicking and answer the question or move on. Sure if the question is badly made then downvote it. Whilst downvote for disagreement is encouraged here (by the site owners) you can't "disagree" with a question, that's nonsensical.
- dijit 8y agoI make a habit of commenting if I downvote, sure, the commenter might not like what I have to say but I feel I owe it to them to be as honest about why I felt they weren't contributing to the discussion. To answer your question: "how can you disagree with a question"; well, you can downvote a question that is loaded (with some kind of ignorant agenda) or a question that is so blisteringly ignorant by itself that it is plain and obvious that the commenter didn't read the article posted, even a skim-read.
- rdiddly 8y agoDownvoting for disagreement is encouraged? That's news to me! Not welcome news either, because I like the idea that the "quality" of the comment matters more.
- Ambroos 8y agoComing soon: Amazon launches free DNS service on 3.3.3.3 and 3.4.3.4? It's pretty crazy though that that huge range goes to Amazon in full. Wouldn't it have been better for the health of the internet as a whole to get them back to IANA for redistribution?
- adictator 8y agoHow else will we get people to adopt ipv6?
- Symbiote 8y agoBest for the internet is encouraging IPv6. There aren't extre fees for that, so people with less money are equal. Meanwhile, if Amazon is going to use all these in the medium-term future, that seems OK to me. (3.3.3.3 and 3.2.1.0 would be more memorable.)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Ocha 8y agoWhile 3.2.1.0 is a valid IP address, some users might experience problems with IP address ending in 0. It would not be a good idea to use 3.2.1.0 if you want best compatibility with all available hardware/software on the market.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agor-really? What do people do with routers that use 192.168.1.0?
- eli 8y agoIt's probably less of an issue when you're on a local network with the device you're trying to connect to. That said, I think 192.168.0.1 (ending in a 1) is much more common.
- 8y ago
- equasar 8y agoHow much does cost to own those kind of DNS resolvers?
- tyingq 8y agoThe cost for a "vanity/memorable ip" like 8.8.8.8, or the cost of a global anycast redundant recursive resolver setup?
- mxuribe 8y agoYeah, i'm curious, so what does it cost for a "vanity/memorable ip like 8.8.8.8"?
- caymanjim 8y agoYou're not going to be able to have a single IP address globally routed. Practically speaking, you can't own anything smaller than a /24 network.
- tyingq 8y agoA /24 is probably in the ~$4k range. No idea what a netblock with a cool/vanity IP might cost. Pretty sure all the single digit ones are impossible to buy, but there could be others that would be a premium above regular pricing.
- captn3m0 8y agoAWS already runs private resolves in each AWS Region. This would be a minor overhead for them, if they wanted to do it.
- ajmarsh 8y agoThe xkcd map will need an update. https://xkcd.com/195/ https://xkcd.com/195/
- Majestic121 8y agoIs this whole list of unallocated blocks still relevant ? I though there was a shortage of IPv4 adresses ?
- reilly3000 8y agoA lot happens on the web in 12 years.
- anonymfus 8y agoNo, it's a map from 2006
- andyidsinga 8y ago"ham radio 44" (!)
- gsich 8y agoThey deserve it more than Amazon.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- btown 8y agoWow. This is a significant slice of the IPv4 address space, and one of the few remaining uninterrupted /8s owned by the private sector. This is a 10-year old visualization, but it's still a good one to visualize the scale of this purchase. http://maps.measurement-factory.com/ http://maps.measurement-factory.com/ It's a great purchase for them, and a shot at Azure and GCP - Amazon can now legitimately tell larger clients "we will have enough IPv4 space to be your partner for all your static-IP-dependent applications, no matter how much you need to scale."
- ghaff 8y agoThey also previously bought half(?) of MIT's /8.
- perfect_wave 8y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20180427061808/http://maps.measurement-factory.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180427061808/http://maps.measu... Hugged to death.
- richardwhiuk 8y agoSimilarly aged - https://xkcd.com/195/ https://xkcd.com/195/
- degenerate 8y agoMuch larger and more readable version of this map: https://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/whois-map/images/whois-20071001.png https://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/whois-map/imag... Each pixel in the image is a /24 network.
- jandrese 8y agoIt's really incredible how so many non-tech companies have /8s still. What is Prudential doing with all of that address space? Eli Lily?!? Who the hell is Cap Debis?
- trynewideas 8y ago
- zwieback 8y agoWhen we were hp we used to own all of 15.0.0.0 and 16.0.0.0 (formerly DEC) but now we're down to only 15 and hpe has 16. It's weird how these blocks move around, should really be more of a shared resource.
- icedchai 8y agoAs an individual, I own an entire /24, registered back in 1993. The people who got in early got a disproportionate amount of address space. New ISPs / companies have to beg and borrow just to get a small slice.
- dijit 8y agoThis is happening with IPv6. People think there's so much address space that wasting several trillion isn't going to matter. The issue is that when you have 95% of your address space allocated and unused you can't reap individual sections, and if you could then you'd bloat the BGP tables to epic proportions. IANA/RIPE need to be more reserved when they have abundance. Actually, that goes for technology in general; just because most of your users have 8G of ram doesn't mean you should think that using 5G is acceptable. (looking at you skype/slack/chrome)
- Symbiote 8y agoPerhaps the visualization here would show you just how huge IPv6 space is. https://subnettingpractice.com/ipv6_is_huge.html https://subnettingpractice.com/ipv6_is_huge.html
- deepsun 8y agoBy the way, I always wondered what if companies start acquiring large IPv6 space chunks, and it will become the same problem as with IPv4. For example in hand, if AWS bought 3.0.0.0/8, cannot they buy 03::? And once enough companies buy huge ranges of IPv6, we would come to the same scarcity as in IPv4, no? PS: I understand that largest CIDR block that can be allocated in IPv6 is /20, not /8. But they could buy 4096 blocks of size /20 to get the whole of /8.
- Symbiote 8y agoAmazon's documentation shows it is already in use on AWS. They also have 18.128.0.0/9, bought from MIT. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges....
- sah2ed 8y agoAnd here's a JSON of their IP blocks: https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aanfhn 8y agoDoes anyone mind sharing how IP addresses are allocated and bought in the first place? Like who did GE buy it from if it wasn't another company?
- mchannon 8y agoI researched it, and I don't have the specifics in front of me, but it looked like a massive corporate giveaway. Perhaps it didn't feel like it as much at the time, since only huge corporations had the need for so many computers. Companies like Merck and Ford, Universities like MIT, don't appear to have paid a dime for them.
- 540297 8y agoBack then I don't think anyone ever considered we'd use up the IPv4 address space and/or assumed that the migration to IPv6 would happen more more quickly, rendering IPv4 obsolete. It looks like most of the big blocks were all assigned prior to widespread consumer internet adoption.
- caymanjim 8y agoBack then IPv6 wasn't planned at all. By the time the need for more address space was realized, v4 addresses were already a valued commodity and no longer given away on request.
- richardwhiuk 8y agoIt's worth noting that at the time for the value of an IP address block was pretty much 0.
- xenadu02 8y agoIn the very early days no one understood that over half of all humans would be on the internet. It was just this ARPANet thing for the military and universities, then a few big companies. So you got a /8 by asking for one; they handed them out for free. Same goes for DNS. You used to request the name and it was yours. No yearly fees. The IP blocks were never reclaimed because it was pointless. Even now clawing back the big /8 assignments only kicks the can down the road for a year, maybe two.
- RKearney 8y agoAs you pointed out, they own 2 /9's. While this covers the entire 3/8 space, they cannot have ROAs signed for the /8 nor can they submit route objects for the /8 until the 2 /9's are consolidated into a single /8.
- pkulak 8y agoFound one more piece to sell off, I guess: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/10/03/654141402/what-happened-to-ge https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/10/03/654141402/what...
- chaoticmass 8y agoGiven General Electric's dire straits lately, it doesn't surprise me they would sell it.
- simonmales 8y agoRe: IPv6 Would love for each AWS account to have it's own IPv6 range out of the box. I feel like this solve the pains the AWS Lambda fans (like myself) have when they need to access a whitelist only service. Disclaimer: Board strokes, I don't really know what I am talking about
- Sohcahtoa82 8y agoIf AWS ever implements IPv6, that's totally possible. The standard IPv6 distribution model calls for end users to be given a /64.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- danzun 8y agoThe shortage of IPv4 addresses is "self-inflicted". If the internet didn't follow this stupid libertarian approach of selling and buying addresses, we could have addresses for everybody.
- forgottenpass 8y agoHow exactly do you fit 7.5 billion unique identifiers into a 32 bit address space? And that's ignoring population growth, multiple devices per person, infrastructure addresses and overhead.
- techplex 8y agoNot everyone needs a public IP, right? Especially with the advent of carrier grade NAT.
- ancarda 8y agoCGNAT will hopefully drive people to IPv6 because it's really quite bad. This talk is really interesting in explaining why it's so bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbk4H6EmZzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbk4H6EmZzI Edit: Changed likely to hopefully... as let's be honest, we'll probably still be using IPv4 in a few decades.
- lolc 8y agoWow that was a very good, if scary, summary of the situation. Whenever my phone browser drags now I'll just say: "thanks CGN".
- PC_LOAD_LETTER 8y agoFrom earlier in this thread "NAT literally breaks IP". NAT is a workaround. Yes, it's our solution to IPv4 shortage in light of not being able to force the world over to IPv6, but it's not ideal.
- forgottenpass 8y ago
- dvno42 8y agoJust a thought but why hasn't Multicast or Reserved sections been sliced up further and added back into the pool? I'm guessing going back and making those addresses Internet routable would be very difficult at this point. Since MBONE[0] is gone I feel like even a /16 would be sufficient for reserved multicast in private networks. A /4 just seems ridiculous to me. I suppose at this point the path of least resistance is to just go to IPv6 though. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone
- amelius 8y agoWhat's next? Rent seeking on IPv4 address space?
- EamonnMR 8y agoIt's already a thing, usually called leasing.
- lbalik 8y agoNot only that, Amazon's HQ2 now covers more of the US than MetroPCS. https://www.techloaf.io/2018/11/08/amazon-hq2-now-covers-more-of-us-than-metropcs/ https://www.techloaf.io/2018/11/08/amazon-hq2-now-covers-mor... (This is a tech humor blog/email I follow - they have been vicious with Amazon this week)
- mixmastamyk 8y agoDo they own them, or is that a figure of speech? Probably should be rented so that the unused eventually come back to the pool.
- mrbill 8y agoI worked for Halliburton as a sysadmin for 12 years.. during that time they owned 34/8 and 134.132/16. Looking now: 134.132/16: still LGC/HAL 34/10: HAL 34.64/10: Google 34.128/10: HAL 34.192/10: Amazon So I guess they decided to make some hefty profit...
- jedisct1 8y agohttps://api.iptoasn.com/v1/as/ip/3.0.0.0 https://api.iptoasn.com/v1/as/ip/3.0.0.0
- jedberg 8y agoAccording to their usually up to date json[0], the IPs are already in use and all 17+M have been assigned to the Singapore region (ap-southwest-1). According to the json they are available for both EC2 and other infrastructure as well (ELBs, API gateway, etc). [0] https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
- cflee 8y agoIt's definitely not all assigned to Singapore or to ap-southwest-1, the ip-ranges.json file reports assignments to other regions, i.e. 3.0.0.0/15 ap-southeast-1 EC2 (Singapore) 3.8.0.0/14 eu-west-2 EC2 3.16.0.0/14 us-east-2 EC2 3.40.0.0/14 eu-west-1 EC2 3.80.0.0/12 us-east-1 EC2 3.104.0.0/14 ap-southeast-2 EC2 3.112.0.0/14 ap-northeast-1 EC2 3.120.0.0/14 eu-central-1 EC2
- Jedd 8y agoIBM owns 9/8 - it's used for their internal network (really). They're mid-way through a 2y project to move everything to IPv6 The recent purchase of OpenShift may be a good answer to 'I wonder what they are intending to do with a /8 in a year'.
- floriferous 8y agoCan someone explain what /8s /16s etc. are? Or a link to a good explainer?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zimmund 8y agoThey are subnetwork masks! It's a formal way of expressing in which range you will find the addresses of a given network (for example: 3.0.0.0/8 is like saying "3.x.x.x addresses"; or, for common home networks you will find something like 192.168.1.0/24, which means "192.168.1.x"). I'm not an expert on the subject, but this site seems to have a complete explanation: http://www.steves-internet-guide.com/subnetting-subnet-masks-explained/ http://www.steves-internet-guide.com/subnetting-subnet-masks...
- phinnaeus 8y agoI believe it means that this block is 1/2^n of the total address space. Basing this off people discussing how this /8 is made up of two /9s. And there seems to be 256 of the GE sized blocks in the map someone posted above: https://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/whois-map/images/whois-20071001.png https://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/whois-map/imag...
- johnflan 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing
- lolc 8y agoIt tells you how many of the 32 bits in your IPv4 addresses are fixed. The rest belongs to your space. In binary, a /8 netmask would look like this: 11111111.00000000.00000000.00000000 and a /16 would look like this: 11111111.11111111.00000000.00000000 So 3.0.0.0/8 means only the first eight bits are fixed. Which gives Amazon 2^24 IP-Addresses to use (32-8 bit). That is huge because it's 1/256 of all available IPv4 addresses. It is small because it's only 16777216 addresses.
- deleted 8y ago
- lgregg 8y agoCan someone give an ELI5 summary on why this is important and has 360+ upvotes? Why would GE have had this? Why did Amazon want it?
- adamt 8y ago3/8 or 3.0.0.0/8 means the IP address range from 3.0.0.0 to 3.255.255.255 - this is 2^24 or 16.7M IP addresses. Why does Amazon want it? - Amazon has a lot of customers who want EC2/ELB instances with their own IP addresses. IPv4 addresses are a scarce resource. Why did GE have it? When the IPv4 address space was formed, various big US companies managed to get the initial IP address allocations. You can see more on these allocations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre... Why so many upvotes? It's relatively rare to see what is 1/255th of the IPv4 address space sold.
- lgregg 8y agoDoes that mean Amazon has a lease from ARIN on those batches of IPv4 addresses for a period of time (in the same sense as a domain registry for x years) or actually own them? Also, That Wikipedia article was particularly helpful. I knew the /32 was specific to my IP that I use but didn't realize the sheer scale of those blocks.
- Ayesh 8y agoIP Address purchases one-time purchases, you don't pay annual fees. There is another comment here that said Amazon paid ~18/IP. They won't pay this next year.
- nil_pointer 8y agoAmazon own the largest public cloud provider (AWS). Assuming they use it on this, it makes sense they'd want a bunch more IP addresses.
- plandis 8y agoHistorically, 32-bit address space was large on the fledgling internet. It was relatively easy and cheap/free to get a /8. Amazon probably wants it to sell to their customers who need ipv4 instead of v6
- jenscow 8y agoMeh, I have 2 /8s. 10 and 127.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chiph 8y agoAnd GE sells another valuable asset. (Previously: appliances to Haier, property portfolio to Wells Fargo)
- int_19h 8y agoGiven that IP is a scarce resource, why aren't we taxing those large IP blocks similar to property taxes on land? If holding an /8 came with a hefty tax bill attached, it would 1) encourage companies that got them for historical reasons and don't have much practical use for them to sell them to those who actually need a lot of IPs, and 2) encourage IPv6 MIGRATION.
- nolok 8y agoWho do you pay the tax to? Be warned that your answer will probably lead to a fragmented Internet, or encourage even less redistribution according to real needs
- QML 8y agoIsn’t there a misalignment between IPv6 adoption and scarcity of IP addresses? We rely on ISPs to adopt IPv6, but if they also own IP space, why would they lower the value of their holdings.
- arduinomancer 8y agoHow much would something like this cost Amazon?