Subj : The /8 addresses
To   : All
From : Bj”rn Felten
Date : Thu Apr 24 2014 00:47:33

Reading the list of assigned /8 IPv4 addresses is almost like looking at Who is Who in corporate USA.

   First of all, at least ten of the 254 available /8 address ranges (almost 170 million) has been assigned to the US DoD.

   Fair enough, after all it was their invention to start with. But 170 million addresses? Not even if they give every single gun it's own IPv4 address it would make any sense.

   After that there is:

03.0.0.0/8 General Electric Company
09.0.0.0/8 IBM
12.0.0.0/8 AT&T Services
13.0.0.0/8 Xerox Corporation
16.0.0.0/8 Digital Equipment Corporation
17.0.0.0/8 Apple Inc.
19.0.0.0/8 Ford Motor Company
32.0.0.0/8 AT&T Global
34.0.0.0/8 Halliburton
38.0.0.0/8 PSINet Inc.
40.0.0.0/8 Eli Lilly & Co.
47.0.0.0/8 Bell-Northern Research
48.0.0.0/8 Prudential Securities (insurance company)
52.0.0.0/8 duPont

   ... and so on. All of them with a hefty 16.77M address space. And, unlike e.g. Stanford University, that had 36.0.0.0/8 but returned their allocated block, none of the US companies seems interested in reducing their blocks to a more normal state, but rather is trying to make money of it, selling addresses to the highest bidders.

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