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Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

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21–30 of 102 posts

Re: Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

#21
post #11

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 legiti…

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.

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.

Re: Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

#22
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peop…

What sort of money are we talking about here?

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

Re: Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

#25
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.

Re: Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

#27
post #5
post #4

> 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.

It’s frustrating that they paint the unused space as evidence of of abandonment, but the reality is that it’s been impossible to use any of this address space!

I didn't even know about it until yesterday! It's kept quiet and secret I guess. As a ham for 10 years now, I totally would've used this for projects if I could've got allocated space. I believe http://hamwan.org/ is on 44.0.0.0.

Re: Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

#28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of money are we talking about here?

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

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

Re: Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

#29
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s frustrating that they paint the unused space as evidence of of abandonment, but the reality is that it’s been impossible to use any of this address space!

I didn't even know about it until yesterday! It's kept quiet and secret I guess. As a ham for 10 years now, I totally would've used this for projects if I could've got allocated space. I believe http://hamwan.org/ is on 44.0.0.0.

Hanlon's razor says to give this organization the benefit of a doubt, but to see this space go up for sale makes me sad.

Re: Amateur radio digital communications 44.0.0.0/8 partial sell-off

#30
post #4

> 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.

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.

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