[arin-ppml] Reclaiming unused IPv4 space (WAS: Draft Policy 2010-10 (Global Proposal):GlobalPolicy for IPv4 Allocations by the IANA Post Exhaustion- Last Call (textrevised))

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 09:48:05AM -0700, Jim Fitzgerald wrote:
> I guess this brings the related question -- does the community care the status of an organization when it comes to (precious) unused IPv4?  Do we let an organization go out of business, turn down its network, or end up in some indeterminate state, and camp out on a bunch of unused IPv4 simply because they "might exist" somewhere in some form?  If so, how long do we allow that?  My example blocks have been in this state for over 3 years.  Long enough?  Can we look at obvious indicators of use such as presence in the global routing tables?  If I turn down these blocks, they will not appear in the global routing tables any longer.. good enough?

In many ways the community has "solved" this problem going forward.
For all resources issued since the formation of ARIN there is a
yearly fee.  If that fee is no longer paid because a company goes
defunct the resource will be reclaimed after the fee is not paid
and a notice period has elapsed.  I'm sure John can elaborate, but
I think the "worst case" for a company that goes under the day after
it paid a renewal is something like 2 years.

The issue at hand is largely only in the domain of legacy space.
There is no yearly fee, and thus no mechanism by which ARIN can
determine that a resource is no longer in use.

In terms of IPv4 runout, I don't believe this is a very interesting
issue.  What you have is a lot of /24, err "Class C's" when they
were given out, that were handed to individuals and small businesses
when they were free for the asking and somewhere along the line the
company went under, the individual dropped out of the industry, or
whatnot.  We don't have a problem with "forgotten" /8's.

However, in terms of spammers having space to hijack, and the general
concept of Stweardship I think this is a significant problem and
needs to be addressed.  I've long been a proponent that legacy
holders need to be brought into the fold for this and other reasons.

IMHO the minimum that ARIN should do is have yearly contact with
anyone holding a number resource, including legacy holders.  I don't
know what the cost is to send a letter, get back a respose and check
off "yes that person still exists", but I can't imagine it is a
lot.  I would be very supportive of a policy that caused ARIN to
charge a fee to legacy holders of $5, or $10 or whatever that cost
is per year to "keep their database entry current" so the community
can detect situations like this one.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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