On: Don’t look now, but AWS might be a billion-dollar ...

[theatraine]

If we could generate random IP samplings by crawling, and if the IP addresses are linearly incremented, then we would have a problem analogous to the German tank problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem) allowing us to compute the minimum variance estimate of the total number of IPs from a random sampling as: max(IPs observed)*(1+(number of IPs observed)^-1)-1.

[dredmorbius → theatraine]

You can probably simplify that task markedly using the Routeviews Project data.

http://www.routeviews.org/

Zonefiles are downloadable.

If you can get a comprehensive list of AWS/Amazon ASNs, you could also hit up the CIDR Report: http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/

The rabbit I haven't been able to pull from a hat yet is getting that list of ASNs without a fair bit of legwork.