When the Internet was young - IP Allocation

You may, or may not, be aware that the internet is split into enormous address “blocks” composed of 4 digits. Those 4 digits is how everyone else on the internet finds you and how information traverses the internet; from one IP address to another.

What’s, marginally, interesting is how those 4 digits are allocated to people/companies. Obviously you could do it on a “first come, first served” basis but that would be very difficult to manage a person/company may want 1000 now, 100 later and 500 in 3 years time all of which would not be contiguous. As such, and in a similar way to area codes, entire “blocks” were given away to make companies lives easier.

Without going into why blocks are created the way they are I was curious to look at the allocation of the Class “A” blocks which represent 1/256th of the internet address space (that’s an awful lot!) and how they were allocated.

From this site: IANA you can see some history of people who were big enough, at the time, to now own 1/256th of the internet address space:

GEC,
IBM,
Level 3 (they have 2 blocks so own 1/128th),
AT&T (2 blocks),
Xerox,
HP,
DEC (now owned by HP),
Apple,
MIT,
Ford,
UK MoD,   Haliburton, Prudential Securities (investment bank),
UK DWP,
DuPont (US Chemical company),
Daimler,
SITA (Aerospace),
US Gov - 9 blocks around 1/28th of the internet

It’s an odd selection of companies and between them they own around 1/10th of the entire internet address space! It’s not as if these are even countries (apart from the US which has more than anyone) so the REST OF THE WORLD has to fight over the 90% of the internet addresses that these guys don’t have.