And so it ends...

Thu Feb 3 19:54:02 UTC 2011

That's the question, and it seemed that the answer started to be formulated in terms of 'community acquiescence/policy leads to authority' in a previous email, so I wanted to make sure that was in fact the response to the question, at least in part.

ARIN will likely argue that 'this was done already' (i.e. they've taken legacy IP space away from an unwilling/uncooperative holder of said legacy space), but I haven't seen such an example.

This is a good debate, a lot of people are already annoyed at these questions and every single one always has an air of 'stfu kid' about them.  But then again, a lot of ppl got annoyed at the civil rights movement.  (drifting off topic here).  You cannot escape these questions and they will be decided firmly (in a legal sense) sooner or later.  

It may be that this all becomes moot when v6 gets fully deployed, but until then, it's a worthwhile conversation to have.

On Feb 3, 2011, at 2:34 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:

> I strongly suspect that his question is actually "Does ARIN have any 
> enforceable legal authority to compel an entity to cease using a
> specific block of address space, absent a contract?"