And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

Wed Oct 19 08:43:27 UTC 2005

> Obviously if the RIRs contacted the folks responsible for a given block 
and 
> were provided justification for its continued allocation, then it should 
not 
> be reclaimed.  On the other hand, folks sitting on several class Bs and 
not 
> using them could have their blocks reclaimed trivially; ditto for 
companies 
> that no longer exist.  The last is certainly doable without much risk of 

> controversy.

This is exactly what the Internic did many years ago. I, like many
other people, had registered a .com domain name at no cost. Then
suddenly one day, the Internic said that I had to pay an annual
subscription fee for this domain name. Like many others, I paid
my fees. There were a few complaints about this but by and large 
people accepted the idea that you had to MAINTAIN a business
relationship with the domain name registry in order to continue
using a domain name.

For some reason, this concept of MAINTAINING a business relationship
with the registry, has not caught on in the Regional IP Registry
arena. Of course, a large number of IP address users do pay annual
membership subscription fees to ARIN (or other RIRs) but not all.
And the RIRs seem unwilling to withdraw services (in-addr.arpa)
from those who do not MAINTAIN a business relationship.

> However, one of the articles referred to recently in this thread (I 
forget 
> which) showed that even if we reclaimed all of the address space that is 

> currently unannounced (in use or not), we'd buy ourselves a trivially 
short 
> extension of the IPv4 address space exhaustion date.  Considering the 
cost 
> of performing the task, doing so seems rather pointless; our time would 
be 
> better spent getting IPv6 deployed and either reengineering the routing 
> system or switching to geo addresses.

Probably this article from the Cisco IP Journal which
has been mentioned a few times in the past week.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_8-3/ipv4.html

>From the viewpoint of avoiding an addressing crisis and
avoiding a v6 transition crisis, your advice is sound.
However, from the viewpoint of having a sensibly functioning
RIR system, I think we still need to deal with two issues.
One is that the holders of IP address allocations should
be required to maintain a business relationship with the RIR
or lose the right to use those IP addresses. The other is 
that the RIRs need to fix the whole debacle that is "whois"
and "routing registries". There should be no need for 3rd
party bogon lists. The RIR's should publish an authoritative
registry, rooted in IANA, that covers the entire IPv4 and
IPv6 address spaces. An operator faced with receiving a new
BGP announcement should be able to query such a registry 
and find out whether or not the address block is allocated,
who it is allocated to, and whether that party intends to
announce that exact block size from that exact AS number.

--Michael Dillon