[arin-ppml] Set aside round deux

[William Herrin]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> Do you have any evidence that there are significant quantities of
> non-legacy address space available to be reclaimed at the end of
> an audit process? Even a basis for credible suspicion?

Hi Owen,

Didn't we hear an anecdote last week about someone who quit Verizon a
decade ago but the addresses are still reassigned to them? Didn't one
of the academics do a peer-reviewed study and a scan of the Internet
last year with results suggesting (among other things) that about
2/3rds of the allocated address space is not employed on the public
Internet?

Meaningful audits would be incredibly expensive and manpower
intensive, no doubt about it. The odds of the POC for any given SWIP
being correct, reachable, willing to talk and knowledgeable enough to
confirm both their specific addresses and qualifications for that size
of address bank is, well, not great. Working past that would be really
hard. We could easily find that getting an accurate census requires
sending someone into the field to knock on doors.

But let's not kid ourselves: there are plenty of credible reasons to
believe there are lots of mislaid addresses waiting to be found. The
question is whether finding them would be really expensive or
impossibly expensive.


Even if expensive, I think there are a couple cases where thorough
audits would serve the community well:

1. Reports of fraud or undue carelessness. This should trigger a
stochastic audit where a subset of the address space gets carefully
checked to estimate the error rate. If the error rate looks high, give
the registrant a chance to fix it and the do a new stochastic audit.
If still high, proceed to a full audit.

2. Prior to receiving 4.10 addresses, the organization and its
affiliates should complete a full audit, including their legacy
address space. ARIN may or may not have any rights to an org's legacy
address space, but we're certainly not obligated to give the org more
addresses if it can't prove a cautious and thorough use of its
existing addresses.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
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