[jedberg]

“ APNIC's research group held the IP addresses 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. While the addresses were valid, so many people had entered them into various random systems that they were continuously overwhelmed by a flood of garbage traffic. APNIC wanted to study this garbage traffic but any time they'd tried to announce the IPs, the flood would overwhelm any conventional network.”

https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/

[udev4096]

On a separate note, why was cloudflare given the ownership of 1.1.1.1?

[rs_rs_rs_rs_rs]

It is explained in that blogpost from Cloudflare

'We offered Cloudflare's network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs'