It's multicast, not broadcast. A very small chunk is used by some routing protocols and it has uses in several streaming applications, but indeed it's much larger than it practically needs to be.
However, IMNSHO, all of these proposals if adopted are really just going to make a few people richer in the short term after their adoption and will not do anything significant to solve the problem of IPv4 exhaustion long-term.
Yeah, sorry brain fart. I'm mostly in the camp of just getting on with it with ipv6, but starving the beast doesn't have a great track record. We are talking about 20% of the address space that's being wasted so it's not nothing.
Mike
Starving the beast is actively working to make IPv4 cost-prohibitive. I
only wish those whom Jay refers to, had fewer addresses to buy & sell -
definitely not more.
There are ~4.3B addresses in the entire 32-bit IPv4 space, and there are
~4.3B /64s in every IPv6 /32.
The D/E IPv4 space would make speculators rich, nothing else of note.