Hello Ralph,
Is that true? I thought the space belongs to ARIN, and they loan it to certain parties. Those parties can use the IPs in accordance with ARIN rules.
The way you've written the above statements makes them true. However, such a relationship does not extend to the issue you're dealing with. ARIN cannot dictate the business practices of its constituents. ARIN's policy on renumbering only relates to providers renumbering out of their existing upstream blocks to obtain virgin blocks from ARIN. The renumbering policies of ARIN are not applied, explicitly or implicitly, to the provider's downstream assignment policies. [I guess they would be in theory if you were seeking a larger assignment from your upstream and wanted to renumber out of your existing assignment to obtain that space...] What others have told you here is correct: when you terminated your contract with Cogent [any contract language nonwithstanding] you gave up your "right" to use any portion of their address space. As one person on here already pointed out, this is a good thing. Think about it. /david