Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:13:49 -0600 From: Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com>
With them not requiring a /8 in the first place (after CIDR); one begins to wonder how much of their /8 allocations they actually touched in any meaningful way.
i expect that after final depletion there will be some paid transfers from some of the large legacy blocks. i have no personal knowledge of HP's situation or indeed any /8 holder's situation, but if the market value of these transfers ever meaningfully exceeds the renumbering penalty then their beancounters will find a way to get it done. that's the way of the world. i can imagine this NOT happening. most businesses are looking for long term strategic investments not quick-fix short-term band-aids. a buddy loaned me a macbook after my thinkpad was stolen, and i loved it, and i went down to the apple store to buy one of my own just like my buddy's loaner and they said "we only sell that with the chicklet keyboard now" and i tried it and hated it. i could buy my buddy's laptop but without applecare and without the ability to replace it if it's lost/stolen i'm not willing to make that investment. so for me it's another thinkpad. so if a company who traditionally needs a lot of IPv4 to grow their network knows that they can get one last quarter's worth of it from some legacy /8 holder, they might do some kind of paid transfer, or they might just hum some dire straits and keep moving with their ipv6 plans. Now it's past last call for alcohol Past recall has been here and gone The landlord finally paid us all The satin jazzmen have put away their horns And we're standing outside of this wonderland Looking so bereaved and so bereft Like a Bowery bum when he finally understands The bottle's empty and there's nothing left (Your Latest Trick) for some IPv4 based businesses a /8 would be more than a lifetime supply, but there's a value ceiling imposed by the space other people can get. (when everybody else has made other arrangements, the relative value of one's own hoard decreases.)
Perhaps the RIRs should personally and directly ask each /8 legacy holder to provide account of their utilization (which portions of the allocation is used, how many hosts), and ASK for each unused /22 [or shorter] to be returned.
The legacy holders might (or might not) refuse. They might (or might not) tell the RIRs "Hell no" In any case, the registry should ASK and publish an indication for each legacy /8 at least.
So the community will know which (if any) legacy /8 holders are likely to be returning the community's IPv4 addresses that they obtained but don't have need for.
The community should also know which /8 legacy holders say "Hell no, we're keeping all our /8s, and not telling you how much of the community's IPv4 resources we're actually using".
this gets into the controversial topic of an RIR's standing with respect to legacy space, and i'll leave that to the lawyers to talk about. but as owen and others have said, if a legacy holder were approached in this way knowing that their answer was going to be on the public record in the way, they probably would see no incentive at all to answer the question.