[arin-ppml] Taking back UNUSED addresses.

[Stephen Sprunk]

Dale W. Carder wrote:
> On Sep 16, 2008, at 3:19 PM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
>>  Also, 52% of the network records and 48% of org records haven't been 
>> updated since 1997
>
> For one datapoint, we have been at the same street address as when we 
> were on CSNET 20+ years ago.  My guess would be that not a whole lot 
> of legacy .edu's have moved that couldn't be found easily.

OTOH, those prefixes should be showing up in the DFZ, so I'm not 
particularly concerned about them.

However, IT departments _do_ change address even if the overall 
university doesn't; area codes change, POCs change, NSes, change, etc.  
For instance, out of the 11 OrgID records I see in a query for 
"University of Wisconsin", 10 have been updated since 2001; 3 of 5 ASN 
records have been updated; and 14 of 18 network records have been 
updated.  And, with UW having at least some resources under RSA, I'm not 
particularly worried about the others even if they _aren't_ in use, 
though it'd be nice if you'd return them if not.

>> Unfortunately, those statistics do not account for the varying size 
>> of legacy blocks; they just count records, which could be anywhere 
>> from /8 to /24.
>
> We've returned most of our swamp /24's that I know of, but I doubt 
> having substantially more of the swamp show up in the DFZ would be in 
> everyone's best interest.

Current policy would not allow ARIN to hand them back out as /24s.  If 
some could be aggregated into /20s, that's a good thing.  And, most 
importantly, if they're not registered to anyone, then spammers (or 
anyone else who can't get legitimate space -- which will be a lot of 
folks in a few years) can't hijack them.

S