In the very early days no one understood that over half of all humans would be on the internet. It was just this ARPANet thing for the military and universities, then a few big companies.
So you got a /8 by asking for one; they handed them out for free.
Same goes for DNS. You used to request the name and it was yours. No yearly fees.
The IP blocks were never reclaimed because it was pointless. Even now clawing back the big /8 assignments only kicks the can down the road for a year, maybe two.
And oddly enough, this seems to be happening all over again with ipv6.
My company has a /32 ipv6 space. That's 79228162514264337593543950336 /128s. And we got it by... just asking for it.
I know everyone's shouting about "there are enough IPs for every atom on earth!" but just like "no one understood that over half of all humans would be on the internet", maybe we'll need more IPs in the future becuase of some unforeseen development... it seems silly to be handing out blocks like this just for giggles.
They thought of that; the current allocation scheme will be used for IIRC only 1/8 of the IPv6 address space. If that's ever exhausted, there's still the other 7/8 which can be allocated in a more conservative manner.
So to take a known scale, there is not enough to give one to each person alive. Which might seem crazy but then again, why would everyone not only need an ipv4, but need several (phone, computers, watch, tv,...)? Crazy
That seems wasteful, but that is the equivalent to getting a single IPv4 address by asking for it, and the IPv4 shortage wasn't caused by the distribution of individual addresses. It's a world of difference to getting a /8 by asking for it.
We would still have ipv4 shortage that way though, not enough to give one to everyone, let alone the several we need. Same here, this might seem a crazy problem to worry about, but they're handing out ranges of size large enough that there isn't enough to give one to any person alive.
Those literally weren't fees. The dictionary definition of fee is "a payment made to a professional person or to a professional or public body in exchange for advice or services".
Hence, there were no fees. Stop engaging in pointless (and even incorrect!) sophistry.
IP-Addresses and domain-names are only tangentially related. Just because you pay a fee per domain-name does not mean it's the same for network addresses.
The IANA was responsible for assigning IP addresses back then. It was basically one dude, Jon Postel( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel ), until it was formalized as an organization in 1988.
Back then I don't think anyone ever considered we'd use up the IPv4 address space and/or assumed that the migration to IPv6 would happen more more quickly, rendering IPv4 obsolete. It looks like most of the big blocks were all assigned prior to widespread consumer internet adoption.
Back then IPv6 wasn't planned at all. By the time the need for more address space was realized, v4 addresses were already a valued commodity and no longer given away on request.
So you got a /8 by asking for one; they handed them out for free.
Same goes for DNS. You used to request the name and it was yours. No yearly fees.
The IP blocks were never reclaimed because it was pointless. Even now clawing back the big /8 assignments only kicks the can down the road for a year, maybe two.