During the final minutes of the Trump presidency, an obscure company in South Florida announced to the world’s computer networks that it would begin managing a massive swath of the Internet owned by the U.S. military.
In the months since, the company has claimed control of nearly 175 million IP addresses. Such huge chunks of traditional Internet real estate, amounting to almost six percent of usable addresses in the original addressing scheme of the Web, would be worth billions of dollars on the open market.
With no public explanation of what had taken place, the dramatic shift in IP address space allotment sparked impassioned speculation among network administrators and the Internet industry. That interest only increased when the Pentagon, after weeks of inquiries from The Washington Post, finally offered an explanation. Continue reading.