Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonster | Hacker News Reader

Letter to MIT community: https://gist.github.com/simonster/e22e50cd52b7dffcf5a4db2b8e...

tl;dr MIT is selling off half of 18.0.0.0/8 (8 million IPs)

heh, so they got the 18/8 for free, refused to replace /8 with /16 like other universities did to help relieve IP shortage, but then they simply sold the 8 millions of the addresses for profit, while still hugging to remaining 8 million, even though that their student body size is only ~11,200.

I guess that's good for them, but it's still a dick behavior.

AFAIK, Stanford was the only other university with a /8 though I may be wrong. In any case, I'm not sure what the issue is with extracting money from Amazon for something they own. There are plenty of companies that were in early on that got /8s for relative pennies. Some even have two today by way of acquisition.

Technically it also helps whoever they sold it to. (One side effect of speculation is that stuff gets held in reserve until someone really needs it. :-)

I agree with you, but I guess you could say that those IPs have "appreciated" in value from $0 way-back-when to some considerable sum today.

Slightly longer tl;dr IPv6 is coming and we're working on the upgrade. In the meantime we have 14 million unused IP addresses out of our 16 million allocation. So it seems pretty reasonable to sell 8 million of those off given that they're worth a lot of money and we'll never need them prior to IPv6 adoption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com