[recuter]

> All of those can return their /8. That's 18 /8 potentially available.

If say, Apple is using at least a little bit of that /8 here and there (safe assumption, no?) its going to be hard for them to return it. I'd wager corporations that have /8s have policies that rely on the assumption that they have the whole /8.

So I wouldn't hold my breath on getting one back from them.

[xxpor]

Right. How much code is out there that looks like

     if(recv.ip.contains("2.") {
         //well we know that they're from X co.
     }

[sliverstorm]

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic. I'd bet a lot.

[xxpor]

Not sarcastic. There's a ton of code like that. I've seen it.

Also, I'm surprised no one called me out on the typo and bug in my code :)

[banachtarski]

I'm assuming that smiley face provides the missing paren.

[swixmix]

This could be a fortunate investment that will make them lots of money. Give it back? I doubt it. Sell it back? Profit.

[masklinn]

> This could be a fortunate investment that will make them lots of money.

Apple has ~$150b in cash reserves. Selling a /8 would amount to nothing on their balance sheets, whereas owning a /8 can have invaluable uses.

[davidw]

Apple is probably a bad example.

Presumably, as the good in question becomes scarcer, its value will increase to the point where it makes sense to sell it, or use alternative solutions.

[300bps]

owning a /8 can have invaluable uses

When IPv6 is fully implemented, an IPv4 /8 will be essentially worthless. Reasonable people can disagree as to when that day will come, but it will come. It's probably not that far off.

Why not sell it or suballocate it while you can still get money for it?

[Dylan16807]

There's no reason they would have to return the entire thing. Some /16s would be fine.

[teddyh]

It would also be completely useless, as implementing the reassignment would dwarf the cost of moving to IPv6.

[michaelt]

Reassigning some ipv4 IPs on a handful of corporations' internal networks would dwarf the cost of upgrading the entire internet infrastructure to ipv6?

I get assigned a new ipv4 IP by DHCP every time I reboot my computer. And you should hear the infrastructure people at my ISP and workplace and university squeal when you ask them about ipv6 - far too much work, they say, no plans on the horizon.

[teddyh]

The entire internet infrastructure (backbone routers, etc.) is already using IPv6, so the cost of implementing IPv6 is, by now, entirely on the end-site side.

You should also include a number of additional cost of reassignment, including growth of routing table size.

I'm sorry to inform you that apparently your ISP, your workplace and your university are all either lazy, lying, or both. Implementing IPv6 takes, maybe, a few weeks if you have many servers and a large internal network. If all you have is a webserver which you want to be reachable by IPv6-only customers, an interim solution (tunnel) can be implemented in a few minutes.

[lmm]

>I get assigned a new ipv4 IP by DHCP every time I reboot my computer.

Sure - from your router's subnet. The route to that address still goes to that router. There's no BGP update to propagate, no routing table entry to add to every router on the internet.

I mean, why not assign every IP address individually? That way we'd be fine for up to 2^32 internet-connected devices. Every router would just have to store all 2^32 routes in memory and send out a BGP message whenever anyone rebooted. Can't see any problem with that.

[Dylan16807]

I think michaelt's argument was that it's easy to shuffle the IPs around inside the corporation to allow large, BGP-friendly blocks to be released.