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Comment by z3ugma | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this sounds crazy to an outsider. I highly recommend reading deep into the mailing list conversation from the link. It really does sound like a private organization "squatted" on a public resource, went under the radar for a long time, and then cashed out on their adverse possession.

My outsider perspective on this is ARIN needs to provide a transparency report on the number of complaints it received from legitimate ham operators who attempted to register addresses in this block but were denied by ARDC, and a general oversight review of the characteristics of ARDC as a community steward of this space.

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AMPR was one of the first organizations to register with the DNS in the early 80's. It was an original player on the ARPANET before it was "the Internet." In fact, they tried to register in 1987 using their own TLD (.AMPR) because, according to them, they were a "mobile" network (didn't fall under the ccTLDs) and did not fit into any of the existing gTLD categories. After some deliberation the NIC ultimately registered them under .ORG in 1988.

ARDC had administrative control of 44.0.0.0/8 for decades. It's not squatting... It's their space. There aren't enough active Hams in the world to use all of it, so nothing is lost. We'll all benefit more from Amazon and their customers making use of some of it.

ARDC is supposed to be controlling it on behalf of amateur radio operators throughout the world, not selling it off to amazon.

A mission that they have completely ignored for years and years at a time mind you, it has been nearly impossible to get allocations out of them for extended stretches of time.

I don't like mega-corporations stealing away the "public land" of the RF spectrum.

This is like having a nice public park in your neighborhood get replaced with a Goldman Sachs corporate building.

The difference is those public parks get used. 44.0.0.0/8 is mostly empty.

Even so, we're left with less space than we had before. To my knowledge the FCC is pretty liberal with dishing out public RF spectrum ranges to private entities, but they're much more conservative with turning over private RF ranges to the public.

Every part of the RF spectrum that the public loses is unlikely to be reclaimed. We have less airspace, permanently.

The FCC is shortsighted for not making all spectrum be leased.

It should all be on 25 year leases, auctioned a few years in advance of expiry.

Congress could reclaim spectrum anytime they want, in theory.

ARDC is notorious for radio silence followed by soundly rejecting claims for address space. They're absolutely squatting on it and hoping it flies under the radar, as noted in other comments.

The ARDC may have stolen something from their community but I don't think Amazon got that IP range for free.

> I don't like mega-corporations stealing away the "public land" of the RF spectrum.

this isn't part of the electromagnetic spectrum. these are IP addresses.

amateur radio folks are ideally suited to moving any IP operations over to IPv6.

> This is like having a nice public park in your neighborhood get replaced with a Goldman Sachs corporate building.

more like the derelict parking lot that's chained up so you can't use it.

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