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At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses
An anonymous reader excerpts from an interesting article at Ars Technica, which begins "There are 3,706,650,624 usable IPv4 addresses. On January 1, 2000, approximately 1,615 million (44 percent) were in use and 2,092 million were still available. Today, ten years later, 2,985 million addresses (81 percent) are in use, and 722 million are still free. In that time, the number of addresses used per year increased from 79 million in 2000 to 203 million in 2009. So it's a near certainty that before Barack Obama vacates the White House, we'll be out of IPv4 address[es]. (Even if he doesn't get re-elected.)"
No, not really. There's companies with whole fucking /8 that have no real purpose to own them, but they've just always had them:
003/8 General Electric Company 1994-05 LEGACY /8's ?)
004/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc. 1992-12 LEGACY
008/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc. 1992-12 LEGACY (two
009/8 IBM 1992-08 LEGACY
013/8 Xerox Corporation 1991-09 LEGACY
015/8 Hewlett-Packard Company 1994-07 LEGACY
016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation 1994-11 LEGACY
017/8 Apple Computer Inc. 1992-07 LEGACY
019/8 Ford Motor Company 1995-05 LEGACY
034/8 Halliburton Company 1993-03 LEGACY
044/8 Amateur Radio Digital Communications 1992-07 LEGACY
045/8 Interop Show Network 1995-01 LEGACY
047/8 Bell-Northern Research 1991-01 LEGACY
048/8 Prudential Securities Inc. 1995-05 LEGACY
052/8 E.I. duPont de Nemours and Co., Inc. 1991-12 LEGACY
053/8 Cap Debis CCS 1993-10 LEGACY
054/8 Merck and Co., Inc. 1992-03 LEGACY
056/8 US Postal Service 1994-06 LEGACY
Just get rid of the companies that are reserving such huge spaces without having a real reason to do so, other than that they were there to reserve them in start of 90's. Also US and UK army and defence and other ministers have several /8, but why really? Other countries do just fine without too.
No, not really. There's companies with whole fucking /8 [iana.org] that have no real purpose to own them, but they've just always had them:
The block you listed contain a total of 301,989,888 addresses. At 2009's rate of 203 million addresses per year, returning those blocks would buy us less than 18 months. Big whoop.
Also, some of those companies actually do make significant use of the addresses they have. For example, I happen to know that IBM uses a good chunk of the 9.0.0.0 space.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Thank you for pointing that out. So many people seem to think NAT is a security tool. I think it's because just about any router capable of NAT also has a stateful firewall (since NAT requires tracking of connections) and many people don't understand the distinction.
Why have a legal battle? Just let the current holders auction off sub-blocks.
You're assuming that the holders of these /8's have been using some sane way in which to assign the IPs within their blocks such that large, contiguous regions are still readily available that make the unused addresses readily routeable. Which, from my experience, they don't. And as the Internet would become nearly unroutable if millions of /31's and /32's suddenly appeared, the only way you could make this work is by having each and every one of those organizations effectively defragment their address use to make large, routable blocks that could be reassigned (e.g., /24s or /16s) -- and for organizations of the size that we're discussing, the cost of that is going to be way more than they'll be able to charge for those address blocks, and they aren't going to do it, fight or no fight.
You can't take an entity the size of (for example) IBM and have them compress their address use into a /12 to free up 240 new /24's without it being a very significant cost in terms of effort and downtime -- particularly when they have absolutely no incentive to do so. Nobody in their right mind would spend the necessary amount of money to make it worth their time and effort, when they can get millions of addresses in IPv6 for next to nothing.
Yaz.