alt Hacker News"DPRK can certainly get however many IP addresses they want"
IP4 is quite limited as far as I know and not given out freely since a long time, or what do you mean here?
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APNIC has some addresses [1] and will assign up to two /24s to qualified new accounts within the region. There are also carve outs for National Internet Registries and Internet eXchange Points.
[1] as of Nov 2025, approximately 3 million or a little more than 12,000 /24s https://www.apnic.net/manage-ip/ipv4-exhaustion/#how-to-tras...
Apnic used to hand out a /22 to most members. Its now a waiting list for 2 /24s. They would probably give some priority to a nation state over yet another mdu fibre isp.
IPv4 is readily available and not very expensive. DPRK can just buy or lease them.
IPv4 continues to be available to entities that have a need that fits a particular policy shape, just most people don't. Specifically, you can get IPv4 /24s for IPv6 transition purposes. This includes anycast DNS, MX, etc for legacy clients on other networks, v4-side of CGNAT, etc.
E.g. I was able to get a /24 in the ARIN region in 2021 and could justify 2 more for a _logical_ network topology similar to what NK presents to the world.
APNIC similarly has a pool available for IPv4 allocations: https://www.apnic.net/manage-ip/ipv4-exhaustion/#the-situati...