I'm having a problem getting the Internic to allocate additional IP addresses to us. I'm looking for feedback (public or private) from others who may have had this problem that I can forward to my lawyers. Scruz-Net recently merged with another company. As the new company, we are in the process of deploying a large DS-3 based IP network, with attachments to more than 5 major interconnect points. As such, we need address space both for our backbone and our customers. First, I tried to get address space for the new company. Response was that under the slow-start policies, I could get nothing bigger than a /19. Well, that's not interesting, because I'm not about to deliberately subject myself to routing filters that I think make good technical sense (hello Sprint). So I turned around and said that the EXISTING company (scruz-net) needs more address space. First off, we got told that because we didn't use our last allocation (a /16) quickly enough (three months is their suggestion, took us more like 9-12 months to fill it up, with careful assignment) we obviously didn't need a block that big. (Now, since the point is to conserve routing table size among us providers who carry full tables, isn't it better for me to get a /16 and use it slowly than to get 4 unrelated /18's that each last three months???) So then I argued that since the merger has happened, and we have sales projections that show that with a much larger geographic coverage and hundreds of people out selling the product, we ought to be using addresses a bit faster. That started a back-and-forth where I had to "prove" that a merger had really occured, when I was in fact under legal requirements to not talk about the merger until it was made public. Now I guess they believe that, and they've fallen back on the argument that I don't allocate addresses as well as they'd like. This is based on looking at our rwhois data. Now, we have large numbers of customers with small static blocks who don't really want their name and address listed publically... and so we've listed those blocks as things like w.x.y.z/24 -> "workgroup ISDN accounts in San Jose". But that apparently doesn't satisfy whoever plays netreg@internic.net. In fact, upon reviewing our customer policy about disclosure of customer information, we've had to turn off our rwhois server entirely until we can go through and seriously sanitize it. All I want is some addresses so that I can continue to hook up customers, allocate additional addresses to providers downstream of us who need more addresses for *their* customers, and build a backbone network. But I've been forced into getting our lawyers involved. I never thought that getting another block of IP addresses would come to that. *sigh* Again, anybody who's figured out how to force the Internic to be reasonable about address allocation, *please* drop me a note. -matthew kaufman matthew@scruz.net