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To help me grok this on a conceptual level, what would a competitor to ICANN look like?
What would happen if ICANN disappeared?
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Its hard to say really. All of the IP space is "owned", ICANN is more akin to your local registrar's office, they are recording who owns what, not "deciding" who owns what.
So image a state like Texas, in the early days they were giving out land to encourage settlers, but now local gov offices merely record who owns what since there is no more "free land" to give out.
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Ok, that’s basically what I was thinking.
Thanks for explaining all that!
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That's ARIN
https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/request/
what would a competitor to ICANN look like
A hard fork of the internet amounting to a private network
In the 1980s was IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) which was run by ICANN organization the divi-ed up the space.
Large players at that point got huge blocks.
So ATT controls 12.0.0.0 - 12.255.255.255, and even companies like Ford, HP, Apple held huge blocks.
Military and .edu also held big blocks.
Lots of those companies subsequently sold off portions of their original allocation. You can actually bid / buy blocks of IPv4 that comes available occasionally. Last time I looked, a Class C address (for instance 190.1.1.0 to 190.1.1.255 so a block of 254 addresses) sold for about $12K USD.