[arin-ppml] REQUEST FOR ARIN STAFF Was: Re: Policy Proposal 120: Protecting Number Resources

[Leo Bicknell]

Stephen gave me a great foil to both pick on and praise. :)

In a message written on Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 04:31:11PM -0600, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
> There seems to be a fairly strong consensus that the numbers would be
> significantly larger if ARIN were actively looking for abandoned or
> unjustified resources.

I caution anyone trying to draw such conclusions.  For instance,
there were many fewer people and likely fewer resources being sought
in say, 1991 than 2008.  At the same time it's more likely that
pre-ARIN property is abandoned, as many folks didn't know how to
or that they needed to turn it back in, and if you think about stuff
abandoned in the late 1990's scarcity wasn't as big an issue as
today.

The actual number I was looking for was not the size of the space,
but the NUMBER of netblocks.  I'm more curious if it's 500 or 5000
defunct blocks per year because I suspect the staff time is more
proportal to the number of blocks that must be investigated than
the space.

> Also, keep in mind that the goal is _not_ to reclaim a significant
> amount of space, e.g. to extend the lifetime of IPv4, so how the
> reclamation rate compares to the allocation/assignment rate is irrelevant.

I can't emphasize this enough.  Even if we could get back an entire /8's
worth in the aggregate, which I think is extremely unlikely, it's a drop
in the bucket compared to exhaustion.

But imagine how much spam could be sent, or malware distributed
from a /16 of space someone was able to hijack because the original
owner was no longer interested in it.  I think finding this space and
taking away the big "hijack me" sign on it could be a real benefit to
the network as a whole.

The most important thing to me though is that ARIN is actively taking
care of the space.  Unfortunately one of the duties of a good steward is
to clean up the mess when someone else just walks away.  I'd prefer
folks return addresses when they are done with them rathter than leave
them by the side of a road somewhere like a discarded pop can.  But if
they do leave them by the side of the road ARIN should pick them up,
dust them off and recycle them.

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