MIT no longer owns 18.0.0.0/8

Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind a NAT since most people are behind one these days.

They are... indirectly. MIT can do far more to assist students and researchers using the money they raise by selling off IP addresses than they can by holding on to the addresses in case 16 million students all decide that they want to host their own podcasts.

MIT student body size: ~11,200

Unique IPs on this block: ~16.7 MILLION.

That's ~1500 unique IPs per student.[1]

>Students ran servers in their dorms. Clubs ran servers. Some professors ran servers.

Well, they're still keeping a whole boatload and IPv6 is here, so you're lamenting a scenario that isn't actually happening. MIT students will not have a shortage of IPs for such activities.

Sorry, but we're way past the point of any rational argument to reserve 16 million ipv4 IPs for such a tiny student body. IPv4 hoarding is counter-productive. It keeps organizations from moving to v6 in a timely fashion and over-powers organizations that ran quickly during the IP goldrush way back when. Its not merit based and its just dirty politics as far as I'm concerned. We have v6 now and setting up v6 to v4 gateways is trivial for v4-only destinations. If anything if you love hacking around and setting up boxen then you should be thrilled at what v6 is offering and the amount of addresses you can trivially get, not the opposite. Its legitimately democratizing due to the lack of scarcity while v4 allocation is nothing but representative of the dirty politics and dirty economics of scarcity.

I doubt Vint Cerf is crying in his cornflakes about MIT giving up v4 addresses, and I would assume he's thrilled to hear about v6 getting more traction:

Some researchers wanted a 128-bit space for the binary address, Cerf (recalled) ... But others said, "That's crazy," because it's far larger than necessary, and they suggested a much smaller space. Cerf finally settled on a 32-bit space that was incorporated into IPv4 and provided a respectable 4.3 billion separate addresses.

"It's enough to do an experiment," he said. "The problem is the experiment never ended."

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2227543/software/softwar...

[1] MIT is only giving up half of this mother lode, so each student merely is allocated ~700 each. MIT also claims 14m of those IPs have never been used in internet history.

https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8e...

I'm guessing part of it is because they only preside over a small area that there's a human element to it, they must feel responsible for the internet of these people, and they're close enough to them (in the hierarchy) that that actually matters.