Obviously if the RIRs contacted the folks responsible for a given block and were provided justification for its continued allocation, then it should not be reclaimed. On the other hand, folks sitting on several class Bs and not using them could have their blocks reclaimed trivially; ditto for companies that no longer exist. The last is certainly doable without much risk of
controversy.
This is exactly what the Internic did many years ago. I, like many other people, had registered a .com domain name at no cost. Then suddenly one day, the Internic said that I had to pay an annual subscription fee for this domain name. Like many others, I paid my fees. There were a few complaints about this but by and large people accepted the idea that you had to MAINTAIN a business relationship with the domain name registry in order to continue using a domain name. For some reason, this concept of MAINTAINING a business relationship with the registry, has not caught on in the Regional IP Registry arena. Of course, a large number of IP address users do pay annual membership subscription fees to ARIN (or other RIRs) but not all. And the RIRs seem unwilling to withdraw services (in-addr.arpa) from those who do not MAINTAIN a business relationship.
However, one of the articles referred to recently in this thread (I forget which) showed that even if we reclaimed all of the address space that is
currently unannounced (in use or not), we'd buy ourselves a trivially short extension of the IPv4 address space exhaustion date. Considering the cost of performing the task, doing so seems rather pointless; our time would be better spent getting IPv6 deployed and either reengineering the routing system or switching to geo addresses.
From the viewpoint of avoiding an addressing crisis and avoiding a v6 transition crisis, your advice is sound. However, from the viewpoint of having a sensibly functioning RIR system, I think we still need to deal with two issues. One is that the holders of IP address allocations should be required to maintain a business relationship with the RIR or lose the right to use those IP addresses. The other is
Probably this article from the Cisco IP Journal which has been mentioned a few times in the past week. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_8-3/ipv4.ht... that the RIRs need to fix the whole debacle that is "whois" and "routing registries". There should be no need for 3rd party bogon lists. The RIR's should publish an authoritative registry, rooted in IANA, that covers the entire IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces. An operator faced with receiving a new BGP announcement should be able to query such a registry and find out whether or not the address block is allocated, who it is allocated to, and whether that party intends to announce that exact block size from that exact AS number. --Michael Dillon