Where did all the IP addresses go?

IANA owns the Internet. We'll, at least they manage who gets what IP addresses and guess what?!?!? We are running out. Check out Greg Ferro's posting at http://etherealmind.com/ipocalypse-what-next/ to get more of the scoop. The short story is that we are almost out of unallocated IP addresses requiring the move to IPv6. Now I don't have anything against IPv6 personally but I do know that a wholesale migration to a new IP addressing scheme will likely break one or two things and that's not something I'm looking forward to. That's why Greg's posting was interesting. He provided a link to an IANA web page that lists all of the IP address assignments (in terms of /8 networks). Curious, I checked it out.

I found a lot of what you'd expect - a bunch of /8 ranges assigned to ARIN, RIPE NCC, LACNIC, etc. That's not that interesting. I did find something that was, to me, more interesting. Over 20 /8 ranges were assigned to private companies such as GE, IBM, Xerox HP, DEC, Apple, MIT, Ford, Halliburton, Eli Lily, Bell North, Prudential Securities, Merck and duPont. Also, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has at least 4 that I counted. IANA has 2 allocated to themselves.

This got me thinking. Does any single company actually need over 16 million public IP addresses? I mean, in the age of NAT, PAT and RFC1918 what do you do with that many public networks. The 13 companies I listed above actually have over 200 million public IP addresses between them. To me, that's a little much.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that these companies don't have a right to the IP addresses they registered. I'm not saying that these companies should be forced to give them up. I'm just wondering if DEC or Xerox even have 16 million computers, let alone the need for 16 million public addresses.

Wait! Stop! Hold on a minute! I'm thinking about this all wrong. Just think of the new security concerns there will be when we move to IPv6 in full. OK, so never mind what I was saying. The the IPv6 insanity begin!!!