[arin-ppml] "Millions of Internet Addresses Are Lying Idle"(slashdot)

[Stephen Sprunk]

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jo Rhett [mailto:jrhett at svcolo.com] 
>>
>> On Oct 21, 2008, at 2:39 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>>     
>>> They ARE doing it.  Anyone who has allocated space gets a bill every year.  If their contact info becomes invalid, the bill then gets returned by USPS and after 6 months or whatever, the account goes to collections and the allocated IP addressing becomes forfeit.
>>>       
>> That is the billing contact, entirely separate from the POC data.
>>     
>
> So you are saying that ARIN still has entries in it's POC database for orgs that paid for allocations then stopped paying for them a few years later when those orgs went bankrupt or otherwise disappeared?
>
> I am sure ARIN staff would be most interested in this facinating interpretation of how badly they mis-manage the WHOIS database.
>   

Interpretation?  Mis-management?  There was a recent presentations (I 
forget by who) which called out the number of "orphan" POC entries.  
This isn't news, nor is it necessarily bad.  Orphan POCs do not cause 
any problems other than taking up a few extra bytes in the database.

However, I don't think that is the problem Jo was referring to.  That an 
org's Accounts Payable department pays an invoice on time does _not_ 
guarantee that all the various POCs listed on each of their 
registrations are still valid.

S