I thought apple owned the 17.0.0.0/8 netblock?

They do.

Then how is it squatting?

Even the article defined it as IP space not owned.

From the parent article "I will define IP address squatting as “using IP addresses that are not RFC1918 defined and not your unicast space issued by a RIR”."

Unless this is meant to construe all legacy assignments as "squatting" which is a pants on head definition.

By analogy, domain squatting isn't using a domain that isn't yours, it's underutilizing a limited resource that's assigned to you.

Using IPs for internal networking doesn't necessarily mean under utilizing though; but might not be enough to justify such an assignment today.

I dont disagree, there might-should be clawback provisions for those legacy allocations.

But how do you define 'use' they could easily 'use' them by simply announcing them via BGP and null routing the traffic to the IP's they don't want exposed?

The end answer is still IPv6, where everyone can have as much or as little IP space as they want.

> But how do you define 'use'

Can they make a plausible spreadsheet showing use. But, clawback of IP allocations is very rare, even for allocations that were made with agreements allowing it. There's some high profile cases relating to fraud, but otherwise nope. Legacy allocations would be nice to clean up, but if it's not voluntary, it's not happening. And at this point, if it happens, it's probably going to be a sale rather than a return.

Yeah, I don't really disagree - I think the realistic future is IPv6 - even though my ISP doesn't do dual stack on its business circuits.

I feel like null routing would obviously not count as use.