Phil Howard supposedly said:
With there being a fee structure coming into place for obtaining address space, businesses are going to end up being more conservative with their space requests. Maybe. I suspect many will. If you expect to assign a /17 worth of space over the next year, why ask for all /17 of it now. Why not get a /19 each quarter as needed. With the fee structure in place, there would be less panic about space becoming too scarce.
Now if this does take place, and I believe it will although I am not sure to what scale, that will mean that each business and ISP will have more smaller prefixes. That means more BGP announcements and larger tables and an impact on routers.
Thoughts?
This assumes that ARIN won't be giving you /19 out of a reserved /17 (or /16) and then giving you the other half of the /18, then the other half of the /17, etc, so all you need to do is change your prefix length not the number of announcements. Also your plan doesn't work so well, since ARIN will be charging you a member ship fee based on your expected *yearly* allocation. ---> Phil