240/4 was reserved for future use more than 30 years ago. When is 'the future' if not now. Furthermore, reservations for 0/8, 127/8, and 224/4 seem mostly useless at this point.
Also Ford, Daimler, and Prudential owning huge network blocks and neither even doing business in networking, nor announcing prefixes can be referred to as outright IP squatting (if that term exists). The US DOD seems to be a squatter, too.
Based on professional experience, I doubt that networking equipment can not handle reserved blocks. And if it does not indeed, patches could be provided by vendors for sure within reasonable time.
The problem is not severe enough: neither for a switch to IPv6 (also conceived almost 30 years ago!) nor to make use of unused blocks.
I refuse to believe that IPv4 address exhaustion is actually a thing.
Imagine how many problems would be caused by releasing 0/8 and 127/8 space. There are so many places those are hardcoded, including an uncountable number of internal company applications.
It is irresponsible to use (let alone to hardcode) those addresses in the first place. But in any case, fortunately, software can be patched and it has been done so already in 'tricky' cases: Y2K and X.509 UTCTIME are examples.
My company operates big networks and it caught us off guard when 44/8 got used on the public Internet. Internal tooling used the space because it was assumed to be non-routable. Assumptions like this always carry a risk and sooner or later, they need to be fixed. In our case, a workaround could be produced within hours, and it was fixed within weeks.
0/8 support has been added in the Linux kernel as well.
Edit: scdown.qq.com resolves to 0.0.0.1 and is possibly related to WeChat. I am not sure, if the address is actually routable in China, though.
I doubt anything containing 0.0.0.1 is advertised in China (it's definitely not outside of China). Looks like an address someone would use to indicate an error condition.
... which is just another example of the zillions of cases that would have to be dealt with.
Sure, each one is probably quite easy. But the sheer number of them is huge, and many of them will only be uncovered after they fail, setting off a frantic search for the retired guy with the source code.
With Y2K there was a combination of self-interest and hysteria that motivated organizations to tackle it. With this, it's harder to make that case because IPv6 is here already. I'm sure very few of those applications with hardcoded 0.0.0.0/8 are IPv6-ready, but everyone else can move ahead with IPv6 and those old apps will keep working for years to come. Unleashing 172.0.52.7 as someone's residential IP address will result in seemingly random failures that cause headaches for the ISP, application developers, and corporate IT departments. It'll be a very unpopular idea.
My principal reason for proposing that 127 be reduced to a /16 instead of a /8 was to help unwind the kubernetes hairball.
I have no idea to what extent 0/8 is being used today. I do see quite a bit of 240/4 in private networks. It's a shame that last may never be publically allocated.
Also Ford, Daimler, and Prudential owning huge network blocks and neither even doing business in networking, nor announcing prefixes can be referred to as outright IP squatting (if that term exists). The US DOD seems to be a squatter, too.
Based on professional experience, I doubt that networking equipment can not handle reserved blocks. And if it does not indeed, patches could be provided by vendors for sure within reasonable time.
The problem is not severe enough: neither for a switch to IPv6 (also conceived almost 30 years ago!) nor to make use of unused blocks.
I refuse to believe that IPv4 address exhaustion is actually a thing.