The big Pentagon Internet mystery now partially solved

A very strange thing happened on the internet the day President Joe Biden was sworn in.

A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world’s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the US Department of Defense. That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.

“It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company.


It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon. After weeks of wonder by the networking community, the Pentagon has now provided a very terse explanation for what it’s doing. But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until September.

The military hopes to “assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorised use of DoD IP address space,” said a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, which is running the project.

The Pentagon periodically contends with unauthorised squatting on its space, in part because there has been a shortage of first-generation internet addresses since 2011; they now sell at auction for upwards of $25 each.Madory said advertising the address space will make it easier to chase off squatters.