>>20974
>>20980
It's not. Well, look, I will try to explain it to you fast. An IP address is a scarce resource, there were just a few groups reserved for private use and there are currently more electronics than there are IP addresses (2**32).

At first the internet people had no problem of giving away so called /8 to the networks. There are only 256 so called "/8"s and every /8 is a block of 2**24 IP addresses. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks during all that time DoD received 13 /8s - it obviously doesn't mean that DoD uses all of them and it doesn't even mean that every their device requires an IP address (protip: it doesn't and even most of the times it shouldn't, giving a public access to a device means that everyone can access it someway and shortly it can become a security nightmare). Therefore most of this is wasted.

You know, IP addresses aren't cheap ESPECIALLY in Asia regions. Therefore someone at Alibaba thought to himself: "We need to assign some number to the router machines, there are quite a lot of them, what should we do, should we give them some most probably unused IP addresses or should we overpay for large chunks of IP addresses?". What could possibly go wrong if they chose to use a wasted resource. After all, if someone in China actually wanted to connect to this DoD network, the Alibaba networking people could change "11" to eg. "19" (which is owned and wasted by the Ford Motor Company).

There's a nice map of the internet based on an old idea made by guys at xkcd (the comic). This map shows which part of the IPv4 address space is active and which is wasted: http://caia.swin.edu.au/mapping/ipmap/index.html

Actually, disregard that part about wasting resources. Those subnets (/8s) may even be used, but they aren't routed. Most internet users use the "10.0.0.0/8" for that purpose - aka private use (or something like "192.168.0.0/16").