Yah, it certainly seems like maybe that was peak pricing. This write up has some more data on historical pricing https://www.ipxo.com/blog/ipv4-price-history/
I've also heard folks pay quite a bit over the average price for novelty IP addresses, so perhaps that skewed the data? I'd love to be able to buy 2.2.2.0/23 or my favorite 42.42.42.0/24
Yeah, one example is Cloudflare and 1.1.1.1; though the story behind that is less about money and far more interesting. Apparently, APNIC had owned 1.1.1.1 for, basically, forever, but were never able to actually use it for anything because it caught so much garbage traffic. Cloudflare is one of only a handful of service providers that could announce the IP and handle the traffic; so in exchange for helping APNIC's research group sort through the trash traffic, Cloudflare hosts their DNS resolver there.
That’s pretty cool. I’d never though about bogons and debogonizing before, it’s like chasing off all the squatters on your property and more keep coming. You need some fat pipes and beefy servers to be able to handle all the bogus traffic of machines trying to hit your server, and also be able to actually fulfill your purpose.
Make sense now why Cloudflare would be one of the only companies that could handle it!
The last public analysis was done in 2010 by RIPE and APNIC. At the time, 1.1.1.0/24 was 100 to 200Mb/s of traffic, most of it being audio traffic. In March, when Cloudflare announced 1.0.0.0/24 and 1.1.1.0/24, ~10Gbps of unsolicited background traffic appeared on our interfaces.
Yeah it broke my use case. I used to run `curl --retry 9999 http://1.1.1.1` and since it didn't exit, the heat generated by the running curl process kept me warm in the winter. But now http://1.1.1.1 returns immediately, so I'm freezing!
I mean, for smaller routers that had static routes set for that subnet, it would probably just keep working - the issue being that trying to get to real addresses in the 1.0.0.0/8 network (or parts of it) wouldn't work.
If you were BGP peering then you'd probably get a real route into your local table though.
So yeah, some stuff would probably have just broken, but that's the risk you take using parts of the IP space you shouldn't be using!
To be honest I feel as bad for them as I do for Hamachi, when their (otherwise quite nice in that it was a spiritual predecessor to Tailscale!) overlay VPN service fell apart once 5.0.0.0/24 became publicly assigned.
