Transfer of idle DoD IP addresses took place minutes before Trump left office
The Department of Defense reclaimed the large amount of internet from Global Resource Systems LLC, which is headquartered in Plantation, Florida
At one point, the company more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses – about 6 percent the size of the entire current internet
The company’s address is listed in a co-working space
It is still unclear what exactly the program did or why Global Resource Systems LLC was chosen
Minutes before former President Donald Trump left office, a shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank took control over a large chunk of internet space owned by the Pentagon.
Now the Department of Defense has reclaimed the 175 million IP addresses – about six percent the size of the entire current internet – from Global Resource Systems LLC, which is headquartered in Plantation, Florida, the Washington Post reported Friday.
‘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.
The sell off of Internet space sparked theories the Pentagon could be eventually responding to repeated demands to monetize its collections of millions of dormant web pages.
The military said it hoped to ‘assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,’ according to a statement issued in April by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, which ran the project.
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 last September.