Amazon, or "A very big company with a significant internet presence" like it states on the page?

Nothing of value was lost to ham radio, as no ham or ham organization indeed ever used or would ever use that much address space. I guarantee as this makes the rounds on QRZ a dozen OM's will speak up in fiery, yet misplaced passion, but really, this is a much better use of the addresses and gives the amateur community in general an absolutely massive boost.

A response I saw on the 44net mailing list:

  On 7/18/19 10:57 PM, Majdi S. Abbas wrote:

  What's interesting about this is it was not an ARIN allocation, 
  and the ARDC folks are not the original registrant.  This IANA /8 was
  initially delegated to a community, not an organization.

  So, to the individuals listed in the blog, that I've excerpted
  below, what do you have to say about this?

  Brian Kantor
  kc claffy
  Phil Karn
  Paul Vixie

I find it interesting how AMPR can sell these IPs vs leasing them.

The community (including myself) only learned of the sale when 44/8 reverse DNS lookups returned NXDOMAIN today. There was no consultation with the community. The decision was made in private by the four listed above.

It actually predates that even - rfc790 defines it as AMPRNET as part of ARPANET in 1981.

I spent a bit of time tonight trying to find the old pre-ARIN iana/isif Usenet group and failed. I'd imagine a list that predates ARIN would have some interesting history around this. ARIN's history has the net block assigned by IANA in 1992-07, but their records only show it in existence from 1996.

Additionally, ARDC (the nonprofit that currently owns 44/8) was only registered as such in 2011.

I'll keep looking when I have time.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc790