> The only effect that threats from ARIN would have in this > situation is to make the situation worse. HP uses the address > space internally. Transition to a different address space > where they are behind a NAT has real costs for them. They are > only going to make the transition if they can recover those costs. HP has nothing to worry about threats from ARIN. It is the threat of lawsuits from large ISPs who have been working within the ARIN rules, that HP should worry about. If the situation arises that ARIN cannot supply a large ISP with the addresses that it needs, and that large ISP suspects that HP has more addresses than they can justfy under ARIN's policy, the the large ISP will sue HP. HP is in a very risky postion here if they cannot meet ARIN's requirements for justifying their address allocation. The wise move for HP is to audit their addresses, bring themselves into compliance with ARIN's policies, return the surplus addresses to ARIN and sign a Registration Services Agreement (RSA). I suspect that the main reason why HP is in this position is that the people who manage IPv4 addresses within HP have been flying below the radar of senior management. In HP and many other companies around the world, IP addressing is about to come to the attention of senior management for the first time. I would not bet that senior management views these issues in quite the same way as their network engineers do. --Michael Dillon _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf