British government agency hoards addresses as IP well runs dry

Europe has tapped out its supply of Internet addresses in its assigned range, but some tech prospectors believe they’ve found some IPv4 gold—a full block of 16,777,216 addresses that isn’t used to connect to the Internet. But the British government agency that owns the block of addresses (referred to in IP networking as a /8 block) has no intentions of giving it up, even though almost none of the addresses will ever be publicly accessible. That has inspired an electronic petition campaign on a House of Commons website to convince British lawmakers to auction off the address block.