Phil,
This is one heckuva story! And, you filled in several of the gaps that I was unable to dig up online, at least in a few minutes of pointing/clicking/clacking. I did notice the 2019 tax forms were unavailable, can't wait to diff 2018 2019 (the addition of 0's will be magical). I had a hard time sleeping last night thinking about how one little phone call back in 1980 could result in all this.
So Hank transferred the block of IPs to you, individually? Was that the kind of thing where you were all working on a campus together and it was all word-of-mouth or was it a more formal act on paper? In 2010 though, why did Brian need to ask Hank at all? I mean at that point, they were your individual property. I'm surprised whatever university you were attending did not try to stake a claim to them. Was there any paper trail regarding the ownership / transfer between the original 1980 phone call request and ARDC's inheritance?
This is one of the most amazing stories and biggest mind-blowers I have encountered in amateur radio history. Has anyone written an article / short story about this? If-not, someone needs to etch this one into the books, it's quite incredible.
Joseph Armbruster KJ4JIO
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 1:46 AM Phil Karn via AMSAT-BB amsat-bb@amsat.org wrote:
On 9/10/20 19:40, Bruce Perens via AMSAT-BB wrote:
In the present time, people have grown to take the Internet a lot more seriously, and the world ran out of IPV4 addresses in their 32-bit space. We now have IPV6, which has a much larger address space, but IPV4 is
still
important. So, Brian and friends sold 3/4 of our addresses to Amazon for
a
lot of money, and formed a non-profit to manage it.
Correction: ARDC sold 1/4 (not 3/4) of its original IPv4 address block, 44.0.0.0/8. The part that was sold is 44.192.0.0/10, i.e., the top quarter, which had never been used on the "real" Internet though it had been used internally in some European ampr subnets.
ampr.org still has the bottom 3/4 of its original assignment: 44.0.0.0/9 and 44.128.0.0/10. Hams running IP are still able to use these two blocks.
The 44.0.0.0/8 block was originally obtained by Hank Magnuski, KA6M, in the early 1980s, literally for the cost of a phone call. It did not see much use until the mid 1980s when I began work on my KA9Q NOS TCP/IP package; at that time, Hank transferred control of the 44 block to me. Brian Kantor WB6CYT and Wally Lindstruth WA6JPR soon joined in its management, with Brian running much of the infrastructure out of the University of California San Diego (UCSD) where he spent his entire career.
NONE of us had any idea whatsoever that these numbers would someday have serious monetary value. We did amprnet simply because we really believed in the potential of the Internet and, as hams, felt ham radio was the perfect place to experiment with the Internet protocols. (Some of you have fond memories of those days, as do I.) We thought it was a cool idea that would find good uses, but we had no idea that the Internet over radio would change the world as much as it did. It certainly changed my life; in 1991 I moved from New Jersey to San Diego to accept a position with Qualcomm largely on the basis of my work with TCP/IP over ham radio, and Brian and I became very close friends.
In the early 2010s, Brian obtained Hank's and my consent to transfer formal ownership of this address block to a nonprofit he created for the purpose: Amateur Radio Digital Communications, or ARDC. (Wally Lindstruth had passed away by this time). In 2018 and 2019, with full knowledge and consent of the ARDC board, Brian negotiated the sale of the 44.192.0.0/10 block with the proceeds to ARDC to be used for a wide range of charitable grants to benefit ham radio, the Internet, and especially the intersection of the two and their role in STEM education. Unfortunately, the nature of the IP address market and the size of the sale necessitated secrecy, which none of us liked. A nondisclosure agreement still limits what we can publicly say about the terms of the sale, though some facts can be readily determined from public sources such as the "whois" database and IP address market data.
Brian passed away unexpectedly in November 2019 and I've taken over as president and chair of ARDC. Hank continues to serve on the grant review committee chaired by John Hays, K7VE.
Since ARDC is an IRS 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation, it is required to file detailed tax returns (990 forms) with the IRS; this will happen very shortly. By law, nonprofit tax returns are publicly available.
Phil Karn, KA9Q
ARDC President & Chair
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