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It usually goes like... If you have an AS number, then you have a public presence on the Internet, now you apply/purchase your own dedicated IP addresses, and get them assigned to your AS number, finally broadcast your route in BGP. Practically, you own a portion of the Internet, and you own the IP addresses. You can set redirection, AnyCast, CDN...

If you have your own dedicated IP range and you are advertising routes correctly, then you're as close to ownership of your IP addresses as Google or Facebook are of theirs.

ARIN and RIPE control allocations, but do not control routing to allocated ranges.

I think the point GP was making is that you don’t “own” IP addresses, you effectively “lease” them. If you don’t pay your ARIN (or others) dues, you’ll lose them.

Sure but that is also true of a domain name.

Domains are much more vocal about expiration in my experience, but maybe that’s just the registrars I’ve used.

A few "legacy" address holders in the ARIN region have managed to hold on to legal ownership. https://www.internetgovernance.org/2012/09/22/its-official-l...

But it's true that newcomers these days can't truly "own" their own addresses.