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Closed The DWP should sell its block of 16777216 IP addresses

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The world has run out of IPv4 addresses, making connection of new people and computers to the Internet a chore - and making existing addresses extremely valuable.

It has recently come to light that the Department for Work and Pensions has its own allocated block of 16,777,216 addresses (commonly referred to as a /8), covering 51.0.0.0 to 51.255.255.255. The estimated market value of this block of addresses is between $0.5 and $1.5 billion.

Analysis shows that the DWP is not using any of these addresses in public. If they are being used for internal, private networks then this is a phenomenal waste of public funds - the block 10.0.0.0/8 is specifically earmarked for use on internal private networks, and using the globally routed 51.0.0.0/8 internally is madness.

£1 billion of low-effort extra cash would be a very nice thing to throw at our deficit.

http://blog.jgc.org/2012/09/the-uk-has-entire-unused-ipv4-8-that-is.html

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    This petition will stay open until 17 December 2012.