[arin-ppml] Consultation about Legacy Resources

[Fernando Frediani]

Hello all.

Recently I have been reading some content about IPv4 exhaustion in order 
to understand better the problematic and I am also working on some 
policy proposal drafts and wanted to do a consultation to the community 
that perhaps have knowledge about some of the points I would like to 
ask. It is about some Legacy Resources, how they stand and what may or 
not happen with them in the context of IPv4 exhaustion for the coming years.

It is public knowledge the efforts made in the past for some legacy 
resource holders to hand it back to the community so RIRs could fairly 
distribute these resources to those who have real usage for them. There 
has been some success in it and some holders actually did it like 
Interop, DoD, BBN, Standford University and others.
A while back when I first asked the question of why some holders which 
clearly didn't have usage for most of the IP space refused to return 
them back to IANA the explanation was kind of "acquired rights" which is 
kind of or partially understandable.

1) However two things that calls my attention are for example a) some 
private companies that are not in the telecom/internet industry holding 
a entire /8 and b) the amount of /8's assigned only to DoD (to the best 
of my knowledge 13 of them). I find it pretty hard for a private 
company, even with global presence be able to justify a entire /8 if 
they are not in the telecom/internet industry, including DoD, specially 
from some years ago when the IPv4 exhaustion came to discussion and the 
mechanisms that exists in order to make better usage of each single IPv4 
address.
Question is: what were the results of these conversations with them and 
what were they justification to keep all these /8's at the time ?

2) With regards DoD prefixes specifically as mentioned there has been 
some movements to return some of the space back and that has been done, 
but I couldn't identify exactly which ones were them. Looking at IANA 
IPv4 assignments website I can see some of them designated directly to 
DoD themselves and others appear as "Administered by ARIN". So what is 
the exact difference between them and to those Administered by ARIN does 
it mean in any way that part of that space is not necessarily used by 
the designated entity.

Note: My points are intended to understand better the exhaustion problem 
and find out better what has been happening with legacy resources given 
that many are still probably very underutilized. I don't really want to 
get back things like "IPv4 is over, deploy IPv6" or that these type of 
discussions delay IPv6 deployments. I can assure I do my share in 
implementing IPv6 everywhere I have some responsibility. The point is is 
simply to understand the legacy resources situation and what will happen 
with them in the coming years within this context.

Many thanks and Best Regards
Fernando