This seems like a rather long post for the equivalent of "haha, I can see your underpants." What's the real significance to this vs seeing 10/8 show up in a traceroute?
The article discusses a 2007 proposal [1] for 240/4 to be used as a private address space -- essentially a bigger, alternative to 10/8 -- and then goes on to imply/state that the proposal failed as it was felt that adding further sticking plasters to IPv4 was somehow undermining IPv6 adoption. The point of the article seems to be to show that in reality, 240/4 is being used as a private address space despite not being officially sanctioned as such.
As I think you're pointing out, that's not necessarily interesting because if 240/4 were officially sanctioned as private space, then these people would likely not want to use it, for the same reasons that they aren't already using 10/8.
If such huge companies who has both the need and the resources to use ipv6 internally would rather stick to 240/4 or 10/8 ipv4, what hope do smaller organizations have of adopting ipv6?
People have been privately squatting on public networks like 11/8 since forever. It's a problem for them, maybe, and a mild curiosity for the rest of us. I'm just saying "we saw 240 in a traceroute" could have been a tweet, not a research paper. I kept scrolling and scrolling trying to find out why it wasn't a tweet.
I personally love IP addresses in the 172.16/12 range. I have my house in that range, and I can VPN in from anywhere and never have any IP address conflicts.
EDIT: I just realized you said 192.169/16, which is definitely not available for private IPs.
I talked to someone who had to re-ip his home network because he was using a subnet of 10./8 that conflicted with his VPN/work access. It's still possible to conflict with a local network you're on, it's not that nobody ever uses a 172.16/12 block.
A company I worked for, which is basically a group of a dozen acquisitions, uses practically every RFC1918 block which makes things really annoying. 10./8 used by IT, 192.168/16 used by company X acquired in 2004, 172.17/16 used by company Y acquired in 2011. The list of routes the VPN software installed was impressive.
I think if I were VPNing from a campus or an office, things would be different. Hotels, coffee shops, and corporate guest networks all seem to either like 10/8 or 192.168/16.
By the way, I use 172.30/16 for my home net. I have personally seen use of 172.16/16 and 172.31/16 before.
These are being used as link addresses, they probably aren't even routable within Amazon's network. They probably want the link addresses to be globally unique so it simplifies management or so traceroute reverse lookup is easier (e.g. to pinpoint traffic loss). They probably ran out of the other RFC3330 usual suspects or something.
I wouldn't read too much into it. If they are using it in a way that will break if 240/8 is assigned, I'm sure they will fix it quickly.
I think the thing is that if you actually need only 24ish bits worth of addresses for something and it doesn't need to be routable, ipv6 just adds a lot of baseline complexity ipv4 doesn't have unless you go out of your way. Ipv6 isn't just an address extension, it's a whole ass architecture unto itself.
The current IETF notion seems to be that any decision on 240/4 will hinder IPv6 adoption, they are very unlikely to do anything with it. This ironically means 240/4 ends up de facto private...
That's how I'm reading it too. "IPv4 addresses are scarce and networks play dirty tricks to make things work, news at 11!" We know, folks. IPv4 is awful for network operators in the modern Internet of Way Too Many Things. Let them have their tricks.
