[Glanford]

A considerable controversy exists over the fact that the IPs were allocated to the global amateur radio community to be self-administered, but due to the sale the 044/8 block is now administered by ARIN. The sale hugely benefits an American company, Amazon, with the profits going to ARDC who will likely be biased in benefiting or providing preferential treatment to the American amateur radio community by virtue of themselves being an American company, and despite claims that the sold IPs were unallocated and unused they were in fact partially allocated and used by Europeans.

There could have been a legitimate discussion on whether the amateur radio community really needed some 16M IP addresses and if a partial sale of the resource could have benefited the community more, but any such discussion was denied when the ARDC decided to do backroom deals with IPs they might not legally have had ownership over.

Still, $108 million is a lot more than the 'couple of million' to $50m rumours that were floating about at the time of sale, hopefully they can do some good with the money and buy back some goodwill. Let's just hope the wholesale of prices of IPv4 addresses doesn't rise too much leading to another /10 sale, or if it does that they sell off their own blocks instead of the blocks allocated to the rest of the world.

[lima]

> The sale hugely benefits an American company, Amazon, with the profits going to ARDC who will likely be biased in benefiting or providing preferential treatment to the American amateur radio community by virtue of themselves being an American company, and despite claims that the sold IPs were unallocated and unused they were in fact partially allocated and used by Europeans.

Yep, HAMNET[1] had to renumber parts of their network, which isn't a lot of fun when your routers are on antenna towers.

ARDC is funding only US entities at this time: https://www.ampr.org/giving/

[1]: https://hamnetdb.net