When we were hp we used to own all of 15.0.0.0 and 16.0.0.0 (formerly DEC) but now we're down to only 15 and hpe has 16. It's weird how these blocks move around, should really be more of a shared resource.
As an individual, I own an entire /24, registered back in 1993. The people who got in early got a disproportionate amount of address space. New ISPs / companies have to beg and borrow just to get a small slice.
This is happening with IPv6. People think there's so much address space that wasting several trillion isn't going to matter.
The issue is that when you have 95% of your address space allocated and unused you can't reap individual sections, and if you could then you'd bloat the BGP tables to epic proportions.
IANA/RIPE need to be more reserved when they have abundance.
Actually, that goes for technology in general; just because most of your users have 8G of ram doesn't mean you should think that using 5G is acceptable. (looking at you skype/slack/chrome)
By the way, I always wondered what if companies start acquiring large IPv6 space chunks, and it will become the same problem as with IPv4. For example in hand, if AWS bought 3.0.0.0/8, cannot they buy 03::?
And once enough companies buy huge ranges of IPv6, we would come to the same scarcity as in IPv4, no?
PS: I understand that largest CIDR block that can be allocated in IPv6 is /20, not /8. But they could buy 4096 blocks of size /20 to get the whole of /8.
No, because all global unicast allocations are done out of 2000::/3 This means even if we screw up all these allocations, we have many other chances to get it right.
You don't just buy blocks. You get assigned them, based on evidence of need.
Evidence of need for an IPv4 /8 is plausible for any large organisation, but how would you show you need an IPv6 /8? "Oh, our colonies in Orion's Belt are all expanding very quickly now so we need more space" ?
Now your next question might be, hang on, if you can't buy IP addresses, how does Amazon have 3.0.0.0/8 ? Well, lots of companies can show evidence of need in IPv4 but space is exhausted - so what happens is that if somebody _else_ gives up their address space to someone who have evidence of need that's fine. And a financial inducement to give up your space to somebody else is also fine.
So in a sense you _can_ buy IPv4 addresses, just you aren't allowed to buy them if you aren't going to need them. Hoarding, speculative trading, etcetera are (in principle) not a thing.
I owned a couple /24s around then as well, but I'd completely forgotten about them until now. I never even used them because it was a hassle to get them routed. I assume they've been reallocated by now, but I'm not sure. I don't have access to the [email] domain I registered them from (nor am I even sure what it was at the time).
It is likely they were not reallocated... Any idea what the ranges were or the names you registered them under? You might be able to dig them up with brute force whois or some google searches...
I believe just under my own full name, although I may have specified an organization. If there's no ongoing maintenance requirement to retain IP allocations (like an annual fee), then maybe they are still floating out there attached to me in some way. I'll have to do some research.
For "legacy" space, meaning anything predating ARIN (before 1997-ish), no fees are required unless you chose to sign the registration services agreement. I refused to sign it and my /24 has remained free for the past 25 years.
I'm think if you can reasonate with a hosting provider (big name ones), you can have a /24 block for yourself. You better have a great reason, and be prepared to pay ~$3/ IP.
