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Why does the federal government STILL have control over 6% of the internet IP's? Edit: added the word still. I know the history but that was like 20 years or m
by nickthemagicman 5y ago
Why does the federal government STILL have control over 6% of the internet IP's?
Edit: added the word still. I know the history but that was like 20 years or more ago.
Why did they still have so much IP space?
- Retric 5y agoBecause they paid to create it initially and have yet to sell their address space. There are some great stories early on that break down to: “Why are all these civilians on our network?”
- swarnie 5y agoBecause they can. Who's going to take it off them?
- mc32 5y agoNo because it was first come first served in addition to having sprouted from a government program. Universities who got on the bandwagon first also tended to have multiple class B addresses.
- icedchai 5y agoI know several individuals who have /24's ("class C") blocks, including myself. I always regret not going for the class B. It would've just taken a couple of emails back in 1993.
- zamadatix 5y agoThe first place I was a network admin at they had a /16. I didn't deal with private IPs until I left that company in 2015. Even the printers were on a public IP.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- swarnie 5y agoA great answer in the late 70s, what's the reason for holding on to them today?
- slapfrog 5y agoPossession is 9/10th of the law? They already have them, making it easy for them to keep them.
- 1970-01-01 5y agoThe highest bidder.. China.
- Xorlev 5y agoBack when IPv4 was enough for everyone, huge blocks of IPs were granted to corporations and governments.
- est31 5y agoBecause the internet originated from a federal government project. The federal government of the USA also owns 28% of the land in the USA, means it owns 1.7% of the total land on earth. Also, early owners got huge allocations. And the US government is an early owner.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoDo you like this state of affairs having such a massive federal govt?
- wrs 5y agoThe same reason Apple, Ford, and Bell Labs still have giant blocks — they got in at the beginning when allocation of 4 billion addresses seemed like a non-problem, and haven’t sold out. https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-add...
- gjsman-1000 5y agoHoly moly, Apple owns all of 17 . * . * . * (workaround for HN formatting)? Wow. That's over 16 million IP addresses. Fun.
- iso1210 5y agoApple at least is a major IT company, but Ford!
- rbanffy 5y agoThey needed IP addresses for all their computers. ;-)
- deathanatos 5y agoCIDR notation is how you notate these; Apple owns 17.0.0.0/8; the /8 meaning "8 bits identify the network portion", so just the first octet, or the 17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing#CIDR_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing... Coincidentally, CIDR doesn't conflict with the HN comment syntax. Sometimes shortened to 17/8, but… I wouldn't recommend that.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago> Sometimes shortened to 17/8 This isn't Ipv6! :P
- mkl 5y agoUse \*: 17.*.*.*
- ajross 5y ago"The internet", in the sense of the big TCP/IP v4 network we know today, was a DARPA-funded enhancement to the original ARPANET. The Pentagon owns a big chunk of the internet because the Pentagon paid for the internet, basically. The more interesting bit is how much it they gave away for free, not how much it kept.
- chrisco255 5y agoWe paid for the internet. The Pentagon is paid for by taxes.
- CameronNemo 5y agoAlright, and the "we" you refer to still technically own those addresses.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoBut why? after all these years why did they still have those?
- kasey_junk 5y agoIt’s a strategic asset. The same reason there are giant collections of old military planes out in the desert. You never know when you might need it.
- CydeWeys 5y agoIt used to have control over 100% of them, so this is a big improvement.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoThe internet was created by DARPA.
- eurasiantiger 5y agoThis can be independently verified by running a reverse DNS lookup, which asks the name server for a magic domain: 1.2.3.4 becomes ”4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa”, which then yields NS records for the actual domains served from that address.
- snowwrestler 5y agoTo address your edit, they still do because it doesn’t really matter. We have mitigated IPv4 exhaustion with NAT, and IPv6 adoption is still growing. No one cares enough to try to do anything about it. If you made a list of “most popular concerns about the Internet in 2021,” the size of U.S. federal IP space would be pretty far down.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoNAT has problems. It isn't the same as having an IP address. IPV6 is the solution but has been in adoption forever. I just don't understand what the government needs with all of those IP addresses and what kind of sneaky stuff it's doing behind the scenes.
- SllX 5y agoIt’s not sneaky to own that much address space; just inertia. Remember that the Internet is an outgrowth of ARPANET.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoThe article was literally referring to some super sneaky stuff.
- count 5y agoThey use a ton of it. Millions and millions of devices around the globe on a bunch of networks.