I just knew someone was going to totally change the argument. The argument I was replying to was that they use 16.7MM addresses. I proved that there is no way they use 16.7MM addresses.

So either you didn't read the original argument, or you just like to argue so you are now changing the argument. In either case, I'll bite.

Nobody is asking Ford to be altruistic about this. Right now their /8 has some value. They have a lot of options, not the least of which is to suballocate it for a tremendous amount of money. That's a given - they could probably also come to an arrangement with IANA/ARIN to just sell a part of it back. They'd make a tidy sum in any case. The alternative is the status quo. In 10 years their /8 will go from being worth a lot of money to being worthless. After all, what value would 16.7MM addresses have after IPv6 is fully implemented with its 2^128 addresses?

Companies renumber all the time. And let's be honest... how much renumbering would they really have to do? That whole fantasy land that "every employee must be using multiple public IP addresses" is just plain silly.

> > > They are using 16,777,214 IP addresses?

> > No, they are using their block and their network strategy is predicated upon having an essentially infinite set of IP addresses available.

> I just knew someone was going to totally change the argument. The argument I was replying to was that they use 16.7MM addresses. I proved that there is no way they use 16.7MM addresses.

No, the argument you were replying to was that they make use of the entire address space, which does not at all require every address to be in use. For example, each of their /16s may be used for a different organization, product, or location, and it's likely that many of the /24s for each /16 are further logically divided for organizational and routing purposes.

The idea the original claim was trying to disagree with was that all the network infrastructure in place was using a monolithic /8 with no logical divisions. Specifically, "them" in masklinn's comment was referring to "blocks", not addresses.

> Some of those companies uses their blocks to make every machine in their network globally routable, they don't "need" them but they do use them and they're part of their network architecture.

You're arguing that masklinn intended to say something he didn't say. I argue that he meant exactly what he said. He said they're using their blocks. You're interpreting blocks as "sub-blocks" but I disagree. masklinn also said in supporting his position:

Some of those companies uses their blocks to make every machine in their network globally routable

Really? If you're anything resembling a network engineer, surely you see how ridiculous this is? And how about this other thing he said:

Please note that not only can there be multiple IPs per employee, there are also IPs assigned to services and servers.

Again, really? Multiple public IPs per employee? That's just poppycock. He was wrong, I called him out on it and you can try to re-interpret what he said all you like but the fact is he is just plain wrong. They're not using 16.7MM addresses, they're probably not even using 10% of 16.7MM addresses and assuming that every /8 holder broke their netblocks up in the least flexible and most wasteful way possible is nothing more than an assumption on your part.

Hmm. Fair enough. That's a very reasonable interpretation.

You're right, I was being rather generous in my interpretation, and I don't actually know his intent.