perator. Different urban legends exist about address allocation. Stories about how some North American universities have more addresses than some very large countries are used to show that the address allocation process is not fair, and favors certain geographic regions over others. Although there is some merit to these stories, the universities, organizations, corporations, and also countries, that participated in the Internet when it was still mostly a research network have gotten relatively large (IP) address allocations - such as class As in the beginning. However, as the Internet has grown, the address allocation policies and process have evolved to the one we have today, which is based on need. Hence, these stories are now mostly outdated. 1.7.2 History of IPv4 Address Exhaustion On 3 February 2011, IANA stated that it had allocated the final /8 IPv4 address blocks to the RIRs. In April 2011, APNIC said it had reached its final block of /8, and RIPE NCC indicated the same situation in September 2012. Other RIRs are expected to follow suit very soon. Perhaps by the time you have picked up this book, others will have run out of IPv4 addresses as well. Hence, today easily available IPv4 addresses have been exhausted. The exhaustion of the IPv4 address space, however, was not a surprise, and the technical community has been preparing for it for decades. The first time that the IPv4 addresses were about to be exhausted was at the beginning of 1990s. At that time, the issue was the address classes. As explained before, the addresses were divided in different classes, and the size of the IPv4 address allocation was dependent on the class. This system was very rigid, and it was hard to find a good fit per organization from the classes. Therefore, most bigger organizations needed at least a class B. Hence, the class B addresses were running out fast as the Internet started to grow at the beginning of the 1990s. The Internet technical community at the IETF designed the CIDR [36, 37] to enable the allocation of addres