Pentagon ends mysterious program, Defense Department retakes control of 175 million IP addresses

A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January 2021 — just minutes before President Trump left office — has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department retaking control of 175 million IP addresses. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6 percent of a section of the Internet called IPv4. The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market, and had never been sold or leased to Global Resource Systems. They were merely put under its control for the pilot program created by an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense and bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” that solves emergency problems and conducts experimental work for the military. The Pentagon shed little new light on exactly what the pilot program was doing or why it now has ended, but it's clear that its mission has been extended even as it comes more formally under Pentagon control.