Remember: ARPANet was originally just a DOD research project to connect some universities and military sites. Back when it was opened to the public you could ge

Remember: ARPANet was originally just a DOD research project to connect some universities and military sites. Back when it was opened to the public you could get a .com domain name for free just by asking. Same deal with IP addresses: in the very early days you just had to ask and you could have your own /8 (assuming you were a university, medium-to-large company, or government entity). There has never been any point in clawing back the large class A assignments. If that were done it wouldn't even give us an extra year of IPv4 address assignments before we exhaust the pool again... not that there is any legal mechanism to take them back anyway. The solution is IPv6. Despite the slow rollout it is finally happening now that even the regional RIRs have started to run out of addresses.