Thus spake "John Day" <jeanjour@xxxxxxxxxxx>
If IANA had any resolve there are at least 25 -30 Class A blocks
that should be reclaimed and are not or should not be part of the
public Internet address space.
AFAIK, IANA does not have any reclamation procedures, nor have any every
been assumed to exist. In any event, the legacy assignments were
transferred to their respective RIRs during the ERX process, so it's the
RIRs' problem now.
I don't know what has been going on in the other RIRs, but in ARIN it's been
(heatedly) discussed many times what to do with legacy assignments. Counsel
recently made a statement that it doesn't appear that ARIN has any legal
obligation to maintain registry services for legacy assignments, though it
does have a moral one since that was a condition of ARIN's creation.
Counsel also stated, however, it is unclear that ARIN could assign those
same numbers to someone else later. There's quite a bit of history there,
including the possibility that assignments made during the ARPAnet days
(particularly to universities and defense contractors) were "Government
Furnished Equipment" and thus only the government can take them back.
There's a counter-theory that numbers cannot be property at all and ARIN can
do whatever it wants. Nobody's really sure, least of all the lawyers who'd
inevitably be arguing the issue in court when one (or more likely all) of
those /8 holders sued ARIN for trying to reclaim them. It doesn't matter
who's right in the end; ARIN would be bankrupted just trying to defend
itself against several dozen Fortune 100 companies' legal departments...
We're working on policy proposals to address the issue the best we can,
though, and if you wish to contribute please subscribe to PPML (and read the
archives to get up to speed).
S
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
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