UK sells off unused net addresses (opens in new tab)

Department of Work & Pensions. Ho Ho Ho ! No-one seriously believes the DWP uses a /8. The whole UK Gov can use the block for internal purposes as it was allocated at a time before RFC1918 was a thing and everyone worked on the basis you needed to get an IPv4 allocation for your IP network. Several other public bodies in the UK got smaller blocks too (you can find them without too much digging on Google) but most of these were never externally routable either. You can bet traffic arriving from 51/8 is not about any pension.

Background: there were some pretty forward thinking people in the UK Gov at the early stages of 'the internet'; Parliament got it's own TLD when it was a case of sending an email to be allocated a TLD and various bodies got IPv4 allocations before they even had any sort of working networking going on. There are bits of the stories around if you look hard enough, but I've never seen it pulled together - I'm sure it would make interested (and probably classified) reading.

It is publicly routable. They choose not to announce it. It's not publicly routed, but it most definitely is routable.

We'll never run out in the sense that it will always be possible to buy one if you have enough money. Just like we haven't "run out" of, say, original Apple ][s - if you really want one, and can pay enough, you can still get them in the open market.

Doesn't mean they're available at a practical price for most endeavours though. At some point it's going to become cheaper to use IPv6 than to buy from the limited pool of IPv4 addresses. Indeed for some use cases it's already there.

IPv6 will be inherently necessary.

In the next ~20 years there will be tens of billions of things connected to the Internet, vastly exceeding the v4 limitations.

The ability to have unique addresses for trillions of objects, may enable new technologies we haven't yet thought of.

How about every house, or Sim character, in your own virtual reality universe having a v6 ip address? Silly, sure, so what.

It's technologically absurd to stick to such a limited, primitive system as IPv4, with a mere four billion addresses. It'd be identical to arguing that we don't need more bandwidth, storage, transistors, et al. because, seemingly, we already have a lot. When in fact, every time we expand such restrictions, we discover and invent vast new technology fields.

And the notion that v4 addresses should cost any meaningful sum, when we can each have a million v6 addresses for little to no cost - that makes it clear what the right direction is. Plenty should always be chosen over scarcity in computing resources.

By that logic if we had 10 IP addresses we still wouldn't run out of them if we just could trade them freely. It is pretty obvious why that does not really work.

Well, presumably if blocks of IP addresses get radically smaller, routing tables will get large enough that not every system can handle them. Given how sluggish people are about upgrading to IPv6 people obviously aren't upgrading often, so there must be a lot of legacy equipment out there.

So it's not like I can just buy an one or two IP addresses, like I could in a liquid marketplace.

The economies of scale works backwards here: the more you break up a block of addresses, the more inconvenient it is to route to them and the less they're worth. I'm not sure how easy it is to transfer anything smaller than a /24

> trade freely (currently 4 quid per IP)

Sorry, best I can do is 2 proquo per IP.

Bad jokes aside, I think the IPv6 thing is for the prospective benefit of sundry bits of hardware hippity-hopping around, which would be price sensitive.

IP networks acquired via purchase are still subject to local IRR use regulations. You can't just gobble up IP space without using them nor without using what you've currently got (80% utilization).

Even if you managed to acquire them, the IRR's could claw them back (in theory).

You definitely can. They're referred to as a "transfer," as of course you're not selling ownership.

http://v4escrow.net/v4escrow-completes-the-largest-ip-addres...

http://globenewswire.com/news-release/2014/07/21/652140/1009...

These large blocks might actually predate RIPE and thus not fall under their "jurisdiction".