Jim Fleming <JimFleming@unety.net> writes

Question: When companies like MCI and Bellcore get bought, do they have to turn all of their blocks back into the "NIC" and start over...;-)

I actually went though an amazingly similar situation when we sold off one of our subsidiaries; InterNIC said we could not have new address space because of the B that had been assigned to the newly-sold subsidiary; that we could not "transfer" that block of space. I offered to assume responsibility for the old block, if they would certify me as the authority to have routing turned off for the old subsidiary. In the end, we got new space. All things considered, it would have been nice if it had been a block of addresses that could have been "split" - like a /16 up above 192.x.x.x without confusing the bejeezus out of simple RIP configurations. Would have saved us the "next time I'll just kill myself" task of renumbering, and conserved address space. I think the use of unregistered blocks and better proxy servers is the only way we can avoid this kind of silliness - with a good setup, a Fortune 500 company has only a handful of "visible" IP addresses, with the rest hidden and irrelevant.