[devonnulled]

So back in the day, IANA was the sole controlling body for IP address allocations. When the internet began to grow, they redelegated certain blocks (with the largest being /8 in CIDR notation) to organizations in geographical communities. This is called the RIR (Regional Internet Registry) system. In order to get IP addresses from a certain RIR, you have to be a business or customer within that region. The region of North America and some of Latin America is under the American Registry for Internet Numbers, also known as ARIN.

Please see this page for more information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

Which all has exactly zero to do with what is meant here by "non-US IPv4 address space", as it in no way implies that the systems that you assign those addresses to are themselves located in those geographic areas, let alone that their users speak a particular language and similar crap that people have overloaded the meaning of IP addresses with. It's a division for administrative purposes, nothing more, and as you might notice, it doesn't even have country granularity.

(Also, the question was rhetorical - I know how that idiocy happened, and I expect that most people here do.)

[sneak]

Asking arrogant rhetorical questions on HN that have literal answers, you should not be surprised when you get literal answers.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

Would you mind explaining what was arrogant about my rhetorical question?