Kremen's Buddy?

Tue Sep 12 19:39:53 UTC 2006

On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, andrew2 at one.net wrote:

> It seems to me that this nicely illustrates a major problem with the
> current system.  Here we have large blocks of IP space that, by their
> own rules, ARIN should take back.  It all sounds nice on paper, but
> clearly there is a hole in the system whereby ARIN doesn't know and
> apparently has no way of figuring out that the space is no longer in
> use.  It makes me wonder just how much space like that there is out
> there artifically increasing IP scarcity.  I don't know what the
> solution is, but the way things currently work it seems like if you can
> justify a block today, it's yours forever even if you stop actively
> using it.  Maybe allowing for some kind of IP market would cut down on
> that type of hoarding -- you would at the very least change the type of
> value those subnets have.

Many of those legacy allocations were made before ARIN came into being and 
IP assignments were doled out by the InterNIC.  This was also before 
IANA/ICANN started allocating /8s to the various RIRs to hand out to 
organizations in their respective geographic areas.

That said I think $RIR's approach has been that they won't push an 
organization on their legacy blocks.  There have been a few cases of 
organizations willingly turning in their legacy blocks for more 
appropriately sized ranges in the past.

jms