From: Mark Kent <mark@mainstreet.net> The Internet is no longer an experiment. Well, yes and no. I take very well your point that it's a very large public utility (in the sense of something that people depend on), but at the same time we (i.e. humans) haven't ever built a system like this before, so it's inevitably "an experiment". Like it or not, we're going to be taking some wrong turns. (Long argument as to why this is inevitable left out in the interest of brevity.) So, there are going to be periods of pain while we back and fill. Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat-belts, the ride is going to be a little choppy... Move on higher up the chain and try again. Cutting off companies retroactively is not the answer. You need to put filters in that cut no one off today, but protect against growth tomorrow. Err, umm. If we are to achieve the same *overall* degree of aggregation, accepting less/no aggregation in the numbers allocated in the past means we have to achieve a lot more aggregation (perhaps unachievable levels) in the numbers allocated in the future. Perhaps the right answer, considered as a overall optimization problem, is not quite this far to one end of the spectrum reaching from "old-none, new-total" at one end to "everyone the same" at the other. Noel