It sells blocks of op addresses to whoever wants to buy them. And some of those sell subblocks or even individual ip’s from that.
The bigger a block, the more expensive it is of course.
Your isp will have a range of IP addresses to use for its servers and such. But also hosting and cloud companies.
Some IP addresses are free to use and thus not unique.
For example the 10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x and (i believe) 172.x.x.x. So these are the ranges you will usually find in local networks.
ICANN is ultimately responsible for allocating IP address blocks to different organizations.
This responsibility is further delegated to regional authorities such as ARIN (North America), APNIC (Asia Pacific), RIPE (Europe), LACNIC (Latin and South America), and AFRINIC (Africa).
To get IP addresses you apply for them as an organization and if you qualify you are assigned blocks based on your region.
Only large organizations and ISPs are generally allowed to be allocated IPs on this scale, most individual companies and end users (homes) will get IP addresses assigned to them by their ISP from the ISPs pool.
Several large organizations like Apple, HPE, and the US government have absurdly large blocks of address space assigned to them. This is because they applied in the early days of the internet, and now squat on it.
1.1.1.1 belongs to APNIC and Cloudflare made a deal with them to use it.
1.1.1.1 receives tons of garbage traffic and no one wanted it, except Cloudflare because dealing with that garbage happens to be their business model.
It also was clever marketing because 1.1.1.1 is easy to remember.
Here’s more detail on top of the excellent responses in this thread.
In the beginning, IP addresses were controlled effectively by the US government. The internet was created by ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was built and developed by scientists and engineers at large universities and tech companies. IP addresses were allocated by a small group of people who just did it as a task they were responsible for.
As the internet got bigger, that became an inefficient system, so some additional organization was applied to ensure that IP addresses were being tracked as they were issued and that there was a central place to get them and that everyone who had them had agreed to some rules about their use.
That continued to evolve as the internet continued to evolve and eventually the internet became something that mattered to stakeholders who weren’t the US government and the institutions of the US. At that point the US faced a choice.
It could just own the internet forever, meaning that governance ultimately would be in the hands of the US Congress and the President of the United States, and law involving the internet would be interpreted by US state and federal law. Non US stakeholders would just have to accept that, or they’d have to make their own internet.
The odds that Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc. would just “accept” the US owning and controlling the internet forever were nil. So the people involved quietly made the case to Congress that if Congress didn’t internationalize the internet, there were going to be two (or more internets) that that would be a PITA for everyone, and the US wasn’t going to get much advantage out of being sticklers on this point anyway so the graceful and diplomatic thing would be to come up with a way to internationalize the internet before The Splintering.
And that’s what happened. Congress created the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN). This thing that all the global stakeholders agreed had enough fictional independence that they could all swallow it. Part of the magic was ICANN immediately dividing authority for IP addresses into regional registries that could, if push came to shove, Splinterize the internet and remove control entirely from the US. With that fig-leafery in place, all the stakeholders held their noses and didn’t Splinterize.
That’s basically where we are today. There’s some bureaucracy that handles the recordkeeping and legal enforcement of deals, but almost all the actual allocation of the use of IP addresses is handled by private companies in a decentralized and loosely coordinated way. There’s a few high-profile IP addresses (like 1.1.1.1) that have some political strings attached but by and large the people who do this work are more interested in making the internet safe and resistant to catastrophe than they are interested in flag waving or national posturing so it all (more or less) works smoothly.
Even inside the Great Firewall of China, a vast swathe of the internet that is nominally severed from the rest, these basic systems still remain in place and China has not (yet) Splinterized. Smaller economies like Iran or North Korea can’t afford to pay the tax that Splinterization would cause and Russia is too dysfunctional to really do it; they’d end up with most people on the “real internet” and a handful on the Russian Internet, and the result would just be more friction and pain for Russians and very little for non-Russians.
Comments
ICANN regulates this.
It sells blocks of op addresses to whoever wants to buy them. And some of those sell subblocks or even individual ip’s from that.
The bigger a block, the more expensive it is of course.
Your isp will have a range of IP addresses to use for its servers and such. But also hosting and cloud companies.
Some IP addresses are free to use and thus not unique.
For example the 10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x and (i believe) 172.x.x.x. So these are the ranges you will usually find in local networks.
IP brokers sell them. They are divided into blocks by world region. In North America the organization that manages IP addresses is ARIN.
IANA regulates this via its 5 regional registries. 1.1.1.1 belongs to APNIC.
Cloudflare doesn’t “own” 1.1.1.1 they are just the agreed upon resolver for that specific IP address.
ICANN is ultimately responsible for allocating IP address blocks to different organizations.
This responsibility is further delegated to regional authorities such as ARIN (North America), APNIC (Asia Pacific), RIPE (Europe), LACNIC (Latin and South America), and AFRINIC (Africa).
To get IP addresses you apply for them as an organization and if you qualify you are assigned blocks based on your region.
Only large organizations and ISPs are generally allowed to be allocated IPs on this scale, most individual companies and end users (homes) will get IP addresses assigned to them by their ISP from the ISPs pool.
Several large organizations like Apple, HPE, and the US government have absurdly large blocks of address space assigned to them. This is because they applied in the early days of the internet, and now squat on it.
1.1.1.1 belongs to APNIC and Cloudflare made a deal with them to use it.
1.1.1.1 receives tons of garbage traffic and no one wanted it, except Cloudflare because dealing with that garbage happens to be their business model.
It also was clever marketing because 1.1.1.1 is easy to remember.
Here’s more detail on top of the excellent responses in this thread.
In the beginning, IP addresses were controlled effectively by the US government. The internet was created by ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was built and developed by scientists and engineers at large universities and tech companies. IP addresses were allocated by a small group of people who just did it as a task they were responsible for.
As the internet got bigger, that became an inefficient system, so some additional organization was applied to ensure that IP addresses were being tracked as they were issued and that there was a central place to get them and that everyone who had them had agreed to some rules about their use.
That continued to evolve as the internet continued to evolve and eventually the internet became something that mattered to stakeholders who weren’t the US government and the institutions of the US. At that point the US faced a choice.
It could just own the internet forever, meaning that governance ultimately would be in the hands of the US Congress and the President of the United States, and law involving the internet would be interpreted by US state and federal law. Non US stakeholders would just have to accept that, or they’d have to make their own internet.
The odds that Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc. would just “accept” the US owning and controlling the internet forever were nil. So the people involved quietly made the case to Congress that if Congress didn’t internationalize the internet, there were going to be two (or more internets) that that would be a PITA for everyone, and the US wasn’t going to get much advantage out of being sticklers on this point anyway so the graceful and diplomatic thing would be to come up with a way to internationalize the internet before The Splintering.
And that’s what happened. Congress created the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN). This thing that all the global stakeholders agreed had enough fictional independence that they could all swallow it. Part of the magic was ICANN immediately dividing authority for IP addresses into regional registries that could, if push came to shove, Splinterize the internet and remove control entirely from the US. With that fig-leafery in place, all the stakeholders held their noses and didn’t Splinterize.
That’s basically where we are today. There’s some bureaucracy that handles the recordkeeping and legal enforcement of deals, but almost all the actual allocation of the use of IP addresses is handled by private companies in a decentralized and loosely coordinated way. There’s a few high-profile IP addresses (like 1.1.1.1) that have some political strings attached but by and large the people who do this work are more interested in making the internet safe and resistant to catastrophe than they are interested in flag waving or national posturing so it all (more or less) works smoothly.
Even inside the Great Firewall of China, a vast swathe of the internet that is nominally severed from the rest, these basic systems still remain in place and China has not (yet) Splinterized. Smaller economies like Iran or North Korea can’t afford to pay the tax that Splinterization would cause and Russia is too dysfunctional to really do it; they’d end up with most people on the “real internet” and a handful on the Russian Internet, and the result would just be more friction and pain for Russians and very little for non-Russians.
Fun fact: Apple owns the entire 17.0.0.0/8 subnet.
There are some absurdities in there, like universities getting Multiple /16 blocks of addresses, and in some cases, a /8
A /16 is ~65,536 IP addresses. A /8 is 16 MILLION.