There were a couple of methods suggested here:
preemptive hijacking - voluntary return - periodic fees -
Hijacking has a number of interesting problems Periodic fees will take a year or more to implement Voluntary return can be done -now-.
Which method is the least stressfull and has reasonable impact on the existing routing table crunch?
That depends completely on whether you're firefighting the current urgent problem, or else taking steps to ensure that it's not going to happen in future. Ideally both courses of action should be taken. We're simply discussing what the long term approach should be. Hijacking is not an option. This would *really* mean the end of the Internet as we know it, and there really would be news at 11! :-) Voluntary return is a really good idea, but it relies on good-will (and good manners) to get a return. And I'm quite surprised that there were as many as 15% of prefixes returned in such a short space of time. But periodic fees or some similar scheme is necessary. The matter really boils down to two different psychologies: a) The IANA IP number allocations stay in effect until otherwise notified, or b) The IANA IP number allocations only stay in effect as long as the IANA are kept informed that they are still in use. Voluntary return assumes a), and periodic fees (or similar) assumes b). a) will get a certain amount of response in the short term, and after that, the response will be quite low. b), on the other hand, will gain a very high response in the short term, and as-high-as-is-possible reponse in the long term, albeit at the cost of setting up the administrivia to ensure that the scheme worked. It's a much more aggressive approach, and it may upset some people initially, but long term, it could well turn out to be the only viable option.
There are a wide range of viable alternatives to paying the InterNIC fees.
Perhaps, but any system which might be implemented to return IP allocations will take time, effort and hence money. That the InterNIC should be paid for their efforts is not unreasonable. Nick