A secretive Pentagon program that started on Trump’s last day in office just ended. The mystery has not

WASHINGTON — A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the internet to a Florida company in January — just minutes before President Donald Trump left office — has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses.

The program had drawn scrutiny because of its unusual timing, starting amid a politically charged changeover of federal power, and because of its enormous scale. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6% of a section of the internet called IPv4. The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market.

Adding to the mystery, company registration records showed Global Resource Systems at the time was only a few months old, having been established in September 2020, and had no publicly reported federal contracts, no obvious public-facing website and no sign on the shared office space it listed as its physical address in Plantation, Fla. The company also did not respond to requests for comment, and the Pentagon did not announce the program or publicly acknowledge its existence until The Washington Post reported on it in April.

And now it’s done. Kind of.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon made a technical announcement — visible mainly to network administrators around the world — saying it was resuming control of the 175 million IP addresses and directing the traffic to its own servers…

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