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Does 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?
by aanfhn 8y ago
Does 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.
- parliament32 8y agoAnd oddly enough, this seems to be happening all over again with ipv6. My company has a /32 ipv6 space. That's 79228162514264337593543950336 /128s. And we got it by... just asking for it. I know everyone's shouting about "there are enough IPs for every atom on earth!" but just like "no one understood that over half of all humans would be on the internet", maybe we'll need more IPs in the future becuase of some unforeseen development... it seems silly to be handing out blocks like this just for giggles.
- gvx 8y agoThat seems wasteful, but that is the equivalent to getting a single IPv4 address by asking for it, and the IPv4 shortage wasn't caused by the distribution of individual addresses. It's a world of difference to getting a /8 by asking for it.
- nolok 8y agoWe would still have ipv4 shortage that way though, not enough to give one to everyone, let alone the several we need. Same here, this might seem a crazy problem to worry about, but they're handing out ranges of size large enough that there isn't enough to give one to any person alive.
- PC_LOAD_LETTER 8y agoYeah, we can only give out 4,294,967,295 more /32s to large companies.
- nolok 8y agoSo to take a known scale, there is not enough to give one to each person alive. Which might seem crazy but then again, why would everyone not only need an ipv4, but need several (phone, computers, watch, tv,...)? Crazy
- nikeee 8y agoPeople start encoding information in IPv6 addresses because the address space is so huge. This however, could lead to address shortage. There was an article about this recently on the German news site Heise: https://heise.de/-4196981 https://heise.de/-4196981 Translation: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fheise.de%2F-4196981&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
- hlau 8y agoThe IANA was responsible for assigning IP addresses back then. It was basically one dude, Jon Postel( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel ), until it was formalized as an organization in 1988.