Replacement of Classes
The first architecture change extended the addressing capability in the Internet, but did not prevent IP address shortage. The problem was that many sites needed larger address blocks than a Class C network provided, and therefore they received a Class B block, which was in most cases much larger than required. In the rapid growth of the Internet, the pool of unassigned Class B addresses (214, or about 16,000) was rapidly being depleted. Classful networking was replaced by Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), starting in 1993 with the specification of RFC 1518 and RFC 1519, to attempt to solve this problem.
Early allocations of IP addresses by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) were in some cases not made efficiently, which contributed to the problem. However, the commonly held notion that some American organizations unfairly or unnecessarily received Class A networks is wrong; most such allocations date to the period before the introduction of address classes, when the only address blocks available were what later became known as Class A networks.
Read more about this topic: Classful Network
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