[ppml] Counsel statement on Legacy assignments?

On 10/6/07 8:58 AM, "William Herrin" <arin-contact at dirtside.com> wrote:

> On 10/6/07, Peter Eisch <peter at boku.net> wrote:
>> "As a steward of the Internet community ARIN would like to ask you for your
>> stewardship back to the community.  If you have unused address blocks that
>> you're able and willing to return to the pool for others to potentially use,
>> the Internet community would be appreciative.  With the pending IPv4
>> exhaustion, your contribution back to the community can help extend the open
>> availability for others to use."
> 
> Hi Peter,
> 
> The problem with a letter like this is that while this is the message
> we want to convey, its intellectually dishonest and we will get called
> on it. Let me explain what I mean.
> 
> If you release address space back to ARIN's pool, there is somewhere
> north of an 80% chance that next year it appears within an allocation
> to one of a few hundred megacorps that has a voracious appetite for IP
> addresses. ARIN's process is very top-heavy in that respect; at the
> rate it makes single /20 and longer allocations it could continue for
> decades. Its the big allocations to folks who already hold a lot of
> addresses which are expected to exhaust the free pool in three years.
> The odds favor your old addresses showing up at Verizon, AT&T or
> another like them. Worse, under ARIN's price structure those guys
> don't even have to pay more for it... Just the xxlarge annual fee.
> 

Assuming your predictions here are correct, I don't see the problem.  If the
megacorps are going to consume the address space, they're going to consume
the address space regardless of what the numbers are.  <minisoapbox>It's in
this area though that I wish the registrars would do the community a service
by having them renumber so the number of slots they consume increase by zero
when they are issued new ranges.  With this I wander off to the issue of
routing table size, but numbers are numbers.</minisoapbox>

> Megacorps being what they are, you or someone you know has in the past
> been screwed or treated like a peon by the one who ended up with your
> old IP addresses. That's a pretty foul outcome for someone who has
> generously returned addresses. I'd go so far as to call it a betrayal
> of trust: It would be like volunteering to pick up trash on a highway
> like you see the signs for, only to have the county come in and turn
> it into a toll road.
> 

I really don't follow the example or the analogy, sorry.  Get the in-addrs
updated and the issue is over.  If you're talking about some emotional
reaction then I'll say that I totally agree <grin>.

> Then, when we go back for round two, we'll have zero credibility.
> 
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
> 
>