Longer answer: it doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. I saw where someone did the math of recovering all the corporate /8s (assuming that there was a justifiable reason for repossessing address space that they requested and were allocated fair and square). It would extend the IPv4 timeline by like a month and a half.
IPv4 is used up, and it’d be exceptionally difficult and expensive to claw back subnets.
Saying IPv4 is used up is like saying America was used up after the homesteading period of free land ended. I predict Ford will end up like how Yahoo used to be an Alibaba holding company.
Ford was in early enough that RFC 1918 wasn't a thing, and those address were used internally, using something else would have be rouge.
If I recall Ford also had 20/0.0.0 at one point in time as a dev/staging network.
Source: working at ford in 96 and they had been on IP networking long before I arrived.
Same with General Electric and the 3.x. It was sold it to AWS a few years back, introducing the burden of internal re-addressing.
Before cloud providers/FANG behemoths, these were some of the largest networks around.
Because they're a real estate company, disguised as a fast food chain. Ford on the other hand isn't an internet company, but their IPv4 range represent and actual value on their balance sheets.
Realistically, Ford may also have use their IP range in a kinda of haphazardly way, simply because they never had a shortage or had to deal with multiple public range. So cleaning up their network, to be able to free any number of IPs would be a lot of work, at a high cost, with no real benefit for the company. Sure they could sell the surplus IPs, but they aren't that strapped for cash.
