[ppml] Incentive to legacy address holders

[James Hess]

> Who has the authority to recover those blocks?  Put the other way,
> who has the authority to demand a legacy holder simply stand up and
> say "yep, still here, still in use", as that's the only way it's
> going to happen.  Surely we haven't put all these addresses in the
> virtual bit-bucket because of some implied "no one will ever ask
> you later if you're still using it" clause.  But can ARIN do that?
> IANA?  Does the government have to come back and do it, since they
> gave it out?

I would say the responsibilities went to ICANN, and it would  be
the responsibility of the ICANN ASO to develop suitable policies ultimately
it would be up to the ICANN board to approve or deny policies about what RIRs
can do, policies about what IANA can do, etc, otherwise the  policies already
written apply..

I believe ICANN has deferred to the RIRs on matters like this one; from
a policy making standpoint, the legacy blocks allocated to the RIRs are no
different than the fresh /8s delegated to the RIRs, in that the ASO documents
do not make that kind of distinction about addressing.

I think "legacy addressing"  is mostly a fiction RIRs have created by
attempting to
apply different policies to different registrants, just because the
registration authority
was delegated to a different entity at one time.

We could have called them something different like "people who got addresses,
before we required people to sign a contract in advance."


As I see it, there should be some global policy action encouraged, not just any
one RIR taking it upon itself to try to reclaim inactive legacy
blocks, since the
matter of  lost legacy resources unused for decades need to be reclaimed
outright regardless of region, to avoid wasting blocks of addresses, legacy
blocks that are dormant and unused should be reclaimed in all regions,

provided the cost of reclamation is small enough and the number of
addresses likely to be reclaimed is substantial.

I think what should happen, is first, for records not updated in 5 years that
have no addressing advertised, add a notation to WHOIS records
"Network Seems to be Inactive/Possibly Abandoned, Please contact
xxxx at rir-name if you have information."

In other words, make it very visible that the registry is trying to get
better information about the status of that network.


The last known mailing address should be tried, there is a chance the
old contact
information is still good.

If it is good, and the contact can show they still represent the
organization the
addresses were assigned to, and they are using any of the legacy addresses
(for example, in a private network, where rfc1918 addresses would be
unsuitable),
then they change from inactive/possibly abandoned to "active status".


Once every year or 6 months, publish (somewhere very visible), the
list of  blocks
and organizations with legacy address blocks that appeared to be inactive,
in some very visible location, in the hopes of reaching contacts whose street
address  AND phone numbers had changed over the years.


If there has been no definitive response (with proof that the responder is the
organization the legacy assignment was made to, AND some addresses in the
block are in use or will be in use) for 1 year after the publication,
then return
the address space to IANA or whichever RIR the block was managed by.

If the addresses were claimed to not be in use (but would be in use in
the future),
then only extend the allowed time by another year, and refuse extensions by
more than 3 years in total.

--
-J