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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

The US doesn't have excessive IPv4 Addresses. We have a real shortage and big pain because we don't have anywhere near enough. Sure we have 40% of them all - but that has no indication of what enough is.

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I worked at an ISP way back in the dark ages of 2008 and we were all worried about IP exhaustion then. It's now 17 years later and what do you know, IPv4 is still trucking.

I think we'd be surprised how much address space is actually wasted, not announced or routed.

I have my own /24 that I registered back in the 90's. It is, in fact, routed and announced globally. I know several "early Internet" nerds with the same.

I know three local companies with /16's that aren't even announcing their blocks! Perhaps they use them internally.

100% this, my college had 2 /16s for no reason. The printers were all public, was a mess.

I mean having a public address doesnt mean it has to be publicly routable. Same thing applies to ipv6.

I speak as someone who worked at an institute that had similar abundance of address space.

Indeed, the tragedy of the IPv4+NAT stockholm syndrome is that people view having to use ambiguous addresses as access control and can't distinguish reachability vs addressing.

In my case it was publicly routable. The ips and ports of key infra were on https://www.shodan.io/.

My workstation used to have a public address system it was awesome.

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