[Marqin]

Why does insurance company (Prudential) need whole /8 block?

[zamadatix]

It's not going to make any sense if you ask the question now, ask it in 1990. CIDR didn't start until '93 and when they made the request in '90 they had a reasonable case a /16 would be too small (remember, classful networking times). The WWW hadn't even been invented at CERN yet and hardly anybody was using IP still even inside the networking space, what else was going to be done with IP space if not to assign it?

As for why they still own it places like Amazon which hoover up large deaths of space like this must not have made interesting enough offers yet. GE sold 3/8 that way in 2018 for example.

[fragmede]

Amazon also bought up half of MIT's 18/8 in 2017 for an undisclosed pile of money. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150854

[beckler]

I was at GE when they sold 3/8. It was an absolute nightmare because we still used it internally and had no notice of the sale until after it was done.

[kiallmacinnes]

Need? They most likely don't need it.

They got it back in the day (prob mid-90's) because they asked for it - IP space used to handed out like candy on Halloween.. Now that it's a valuable asset - they are very unlikely to just hand it back.

[kingcharles]

> IP space used to handed out like candy on Halloween

This. I would always ask for a whole Class C when I needed one IP. A Class C was worthless in the 90s. Just like you could buy any dotcom domain you wanted. And mine however many Bitcoins you needed in 2010.

[icedchai]

Yep. I have my own /24 personally, registered back in the mid 90's. I know several other individuals who have them, as well. The early Internet was a very different place.

[oaiey]

The interesting part is: Do they know they own it? If yes, second Question: Does the IT department own it or the finance department own it under the category assets?

[cortesoft]

Of course they know they known it and track it as an asset. It is incredibly valuable.

[riffic]

Apple, AT&T, Ford, the USPS, and Comcast all hold /8s as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

The United States Department of Defense has 14 /8 blocks.

[EvanAnderson]

The school district in my town of 25,000 (school enrollment ~4,300) has a /21 and a /23. They got them back in the 90s.

[zamadatix]

/21 and /23 aren't really much, you could just as easily get those assigned directly in the late 2000s (in the early to mid 2010s it would require some extra paperwork but was still doable). Remember the difference in block sizes is 2^(larger-smaller).

[Tsiklon]

It’s likely they don’t, but we’re part of that early group of companies that moved first. In the article the author mentions that /8 was the smallest amount of space that could be allocated at the time.

Apple, HP and GE (IIRC) also have/had /8’s