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.
This is like having a nice public park in your neighborhood get replaced with a Goldman Sachs corporate building.