
Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off - fanf2
https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102103.html
======
billh
> _These days, less than one third of the address space is assigned and in
> use. Large chunks of it have almost never been used_

This part probably angers me the most as I (and I'm sure many others) have
asked for an allocation in this address space and after waiting months without
reply was eventually denied the request.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
I’m not usually a “let the market decide” person, but ARIN has only made this
problem worse with their idealism over reality policies. Their response has
continued to be “time to switch to ipv6” which grossly oversimplifies the
reality of the issue.

Oddly enough, the Europeans, through RIPE are doing it right by allowing a
market system so that unused but assigned net blocks can be sold to people
that actually have a need for them.

I’ve also faced denials from ARIN for tiny allocations, with a clearly
justified use case. They are a miserable bureaucracy to deal with. But as
others have indicated, there is still a lot of IPv4 that is allocated to
organizations but completely unused.

~~~
adestefan
I believe the op is not talking about a denial by ARIN. The 44 space is
administered by a series of volunteers that I believe is distributed
worldwide. Some people in the amateur radio community like to create little
fiefdoms and the distribution of subnets in 44 is not immune to this type of
gate keeping.

~~~
billh
Correct. ARDC (managing entity of AMPRNet) then used the lack of use of the 44
address space as an excuse to sell it off to the highest bidder. Those
addresses were indeed unused, but not for lack of want.

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Sir_Cmpwn
The money involved in IPv4 allocations - and name allocations too - really
sickens me. It's a blemish on humanity and a testament to the limitless nature
of human greed. IANA (and ICANN as a whole) is a corrupt, captured
organization that I think represents the worst of the internet when it should
have been the best of it. Removing price caps on .org, gold rushing
outrageously priced gTLDs to anyone with the money (private corps), and the
ridiculous marketplace of IPv4 subnets - I'm ashamed to have anything to do
with this community. I'm loathe to extend my contempt to capitalism as a whole
but it's crap like this which makes me wonder if the humanity of future
centuries will look back at our greed-powered society with disdain.

~~~
amingilani
I'm confused. You're blaming humanity because a marketplace developed
following the scarcity of a commodity? Why was any of this bad behavior? I'm
genuinely confused.

~~~
MereInterest
He's blaming humanity for maintaining a commodity as scarce, rather than
working to alleviate the scarcity.

~~~
jnwatson
We did alleviate the scarcity. It is called IPv6.

------
z3ugma
Wow, this sounds crazy to an outsider. I highly recommend reading deep into
the mailing list conversation from the link. It really does sound like a
private organization "squatted" on a public resource, went under the radar for
a long time, and then cashed out on their adverse possession.

My outsider perspective on this is ARIN needs to provide a transparency report
on the number of complaints it received from legitimate ham operators who
attempted to register addresses in this block but were denied by ARDC, and a
general oversight review of the characteristics of ARDC as a community steward
of this space.

~~~
icedchai
ARDC had administrative control of 44.0.0.0/8 for decades. It's not
squatting... It's their space. There aren't enough active Hams in the world to
use all of it, so nothing is lost. We'll all benefit more from Amazon and
their customers making use of some of it.

~~~
nullbyte
I don't like mega-corporations stealing away the "public land" of the RF
spectrum.

This is like having a nice public park in your neighborhood get replaced with
a Goldman Sachs corporate building.

~~~
icedchai
The difference is those public parks get used. 44.0.0.0/8 is mostly empty.

~~~
nullbyte
Even so, we're left with less space than we had before. To my knowledge the
FCC is pretty liberal with dishing out public RF spectrum ranges to private
entities, but they're much more conservative with turning over private RF
ranges to the public.

Every part of the RF spectrum that the public loses is unlikely to be
reclaimed. We have less airspace, permanently.

~~~
londons_explore
The FCC is shortsighted for not making all spectrum be leased.

It should all be on 25 year leases, auctioned a few years in advance of
expiry.

~~~
mycall
Congress could reclaim spectrum anytime they want, in theory.

------
tlrobinson
I don't really have a problem with selling off parts of 44/8 that are unlikely
to ever be used.

I do have a big problem with the ARDC unilaterally doing this without any
public discussion or real accountability.

They should have created a new foundation with board members from various
amateur radio organizations (ARRL, AMSAT, IARU, TAPR, etc) in order to manage
the (rumored $50 million) funds.

------
jrockway
I hate to be a downer, but nobody even knew about this space until it was
mentioned here. I've been a ham for almost 10 years and this is the first I've
heard of it.

The Internet and ham radio don't mix. The rules of the modern Internet are
"encrypt everything and trust nothing." The _laws_ of ham radio are literally
"you must not encrypt anything". It wasn't meant to be, unless you want to
change the laws in every ITU member state. By the time that's done, we will
all be accessing the Hypernet with IPv20 from our personal space stations.

Selling off this IP space to Amazon so that some people can get grants is
going to make way better use of this resource than than the ham community ever
did.

(I like all the people on the nanog list trying to derail it. "Some of the
board members don't have ham licenses!" Not actually a requirement to manage a
ham radio organization. Only a requirement to transmit a signal. "There is an
antique router configuration out there that creates a peering arrangement
between the University of California and Amazon that's not authorized!" Guess
what guys, they'll probably shut down the arrangement. They're not going to
say "welp, there is no way to fix this, here's your money back Amazon!" The
thought that that's a possible outcome is making me laugh. I am sure Amazon
can find a transit provider if they need one.)

~~~
nexuist
> The laws of ham radio are literally "you must not encrypt anything"

Wait, really? Why is this the case?

~~~
tesseract
To enable enforcement of amateurism.

~~~
pmlnr
Similarly why gopher is not encrypted:

[https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?gopher://tilde.te...](https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?gopher://tilde.team:70/0/~rain1/phlog/20190608-encrypting-
gopher.txt)

------
EE84M3i
I wrote about this block earlier last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912496)

Note that this is also the block used for the UCSD CAIDA "Internet Telescope":
[https://www.caida.org/projects/network_telescope/](https://www.caida.org/projects/network_telescope/)

------
ds
Would be interesting to know the salary of the board will be in the future. It
looks and smells like a cash grab to benefit those at the top with cushy jobs
to be a pseudo VC under the guide of giving "grants".

If they were being honest with themselves, they would donate the entirety to
the EFF instead of this bullshit maneuver.

Just to add, even if they dont get a salary at all (I would be shocked), the
responsible thing for them to do would be to give the money away to the EFF or
another org who knows how to best put the money to use.

The idea we are entrusting a group thats financial statement going back the
past few years show just 5k-10k in assets with a 100 million dollar windfall
is insane. If they dont fuck it all up within the first 6 months I will be
shocked. More likely though will be some lawsuits which delays any use of the
funds.

------
halter73
I would have more faith that the ARDC will use the proceeds from the sale for
the benefit of the ham community at large if they engaged the community
beforehand.

It seems to me that they saw the opportunity to make a lot of money, and
figured having a lot of money is a good problem to have and they could figure
out what to do with it later.

The fact that they have no specific public plans for the money is telling.
They mention vague plans for grants, scholarships and a perpetual endowment,
but how do we know they won't keep most of it in the endowment and use most of
the interest to pay board member salaries? If the board decided to do that,
who could stop them? Who elects the board?

I particularly don't like this response:

> This makes me one of a VERY small group of people with any arguable personal
> property interest in network 44. And yes, 25% of this space, which is VERY
> unlikely to ever be used by hams, has been sold to Amazon.

> Rather than try to personally profit from this, we all readily agreed to
> place the _entire_ proceeds of this sale into a 501(c)(3) charity chartered
> to support amateur digital radio and related developments. No one is buying
> a yacht or a mansion.

[https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102138.h...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102138.html)

I'm not saying I expect the board will use the money to buy a yacht or a
mansion, but the whole tone of that email makes it sound like they feel
entitled to do so, and it was only their own magnanimity that caused them to
give the proceeds to a 501(c)(3).

I'd much rather the board of the organization see themselves as stewards who
are not personally entitled to the money. Otherwise you end up with
"charities" like the Trump Foundation.

------
jlv2
Informative thread, with some details on the 501(c)(3) being funded with the
profits:

[https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102138.h...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102138.html)

~~~
syn0byte
[https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/rp1995-48.pdf](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-
tege/rp1995-48.pdf)

I'll bet you it still just vanishes...

------
DonHopkins
I know somebody who basically stole a class A IP network many years ago. (He
wouldn't tell me which one. ;)

The company that owned it went out of business, so he registered their domain
name, and sent in an email to authorize the transfer.

Once you've got a hot class A network on your hands, but don't have 16,777,216
computers to use it, what can you possibly with it?

It's not as if you can hide it in your garage, file the serial number off,
repaint it, and put it up for sale on the black market!

He ended up trading it under the table to a company that could use it, in
exchange for the promise of free service for life.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks)

~~~
icedchai
I can believe this about a class B or C. Class A is too large to go unnoticed.

------
JorgeGT
Interesting to look at the usage of the block in the context of the entire
IPv4 space (2018):
[https://benjojo.co.uk/internet-2018.png](https://benjojo.co.uk/internet-2018.png)

~~~
echelon
What are Ford and Prudential doing with their allocation? It seems unnecessary
for them to have so much space.

~~~
JorgeGT
I guess that at some point Ford though they could have an IP for each car? Out
of curiosity I looked at the headers of an email I got from them and sure
enough it came from an IP in their allocation! However, the same was not true
for emails from Daimler...

------
dang
A small earlier thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855).

------
rexarex
We were supposed to run out of space in the 90s, but NAT was a temporary
bandaid that turned into the status quo. Not the original intent, and it’s
used as a de facto firewall with really mixed results.

I say, exhaust it and force people into IPv6 like we should all be on.

~~~
rohan1024
There's no incentive for migrating to ipv6 for corporations. I have said this
previously NAT breaks the Internet [0]. Without setting an expiration date for
ipv4 NAT is going to get dragged to 2050.

[0]:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253427)

~~~
vwdhx
Maybe NAT breaks the Internet of twenty years ago. But we've already worked
around it. I'm using a computer which is behind a NAT which is behind a CG-NAT
and everything works fine. Sure, people can't connect to me directly, but why
would I want that to happen? If anything, that makes my computer more secure.

I know this sounds like trolling, but let's be pragmatic.

~~~
fragmede
Some users _do_ want people to be able to connect to them directly though,
hence Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), which can open ports on your router. You
may disagree with the wisdom of automating the port forwarding process for
people who don't understand networking concepts but there are people that do
want other people to be able to connect to them directly, even if you don't.

Generalizing that one use case will suits everybody, fits about as well as
one-size-fits-all clothing. Which never fits right.

~~~
yardstick
Those that want or need a public IP can pay for it. I do. As you say, there is
no one-size-fits-all.

~~~
rohan1024
This is why we are stuck with huge corporations to provide services to connect
to each other. We are sacrificing privacy because we don't want direct
connections. We could have hosted an Instagram clone at home as well if NAT
wasn't there.

Ability to connect directly does not necessarily mean that you are somehow
more vulnerable to attack. There are measures that you can take to prevent
attacks from happening. It's trivial to configure.

------
farisjarrah
I am not familiar with this domain, anyone mind answering: What does this mean
for amateur radio practitioners, and what does this mean for the greater
internet/communications industry?

~~~
colechristensen
They had a /8, out of that they sold a /10 to probably one of the big 5.

They never got close to using the whole /8 and currently allocated about a
third of it.

They are using the money for grants and scholarships and perhaps an endowment
to fund them perpetually (and just being cynical, probably paying the board
who made this decision some of that money as well)

IPs and blocks have been allocated for decades to people for amateur radio
related things and will continue to do so without any changes.

~~~
cm2187
What sort of money are we talking about here?

~~~
Bluecobra
44.192.0.0/10 was sold which equals 4,194,304 IP addresses. At $20.00/address
that comes out to a cool $83,886,040.

Using this to base the IP address cost: [https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-
sales](https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales)

~~~
virtuallynathan
None of the big guys are paying this much, especially for blocks this size.
$5-10/IP.

~~~
throwaway2048
Nice to see they get backroom deals for about 0.15% of the ip addresses on the
internet, AND massive discounts.

~~~
oh_sigh
A volume discount isn't a backroom deal. Unless you think for some reason the
group that controls 44.0.0.0/8 is beholden to Amazon or big tech for some
reason.

~~~
throwaway2048
No, but the deal itself is certainly extremely suspect and with a total lack
of transparency for a supposedly public resource.

