And in complete fairness - why should folks who received vast tracts of addresses for little or no cost under a justified-need regime now have free reign to monetize their sale?
All of the real estate in my part of New York traces back to Military Tract so and so. In the 1790s the state allocated two million acres on a justified-need basis, with the rule being that if you were a Revolutionary War veteran, that justified you getting 600 acres, free. You had to provide your own mule. Once the lots were all handed out, in subsequent transfers, nobody justified anything. If you want to sell and I want to buy, that's that and the county records it for a nominal clerical fee. You will doubtless find similar histories all over the country. IPv4 space is rapidly nearing the end of the homesteading era, and I suspect you're going to have as much luck insisting that future transfers obey the historic rules as my town would have had insisting that owners could subdivide only if they were selling to other veterans. To firm up my example of A selling to B a little, I was assuming there was nothing wrong with B other than that ARIN wasn't satisfied with the documentation they provided to show why they needed a /20. Maybe they're a startup, their VCs don't want them leaking their plans, and don't see why anyone needs any justification other than the bill of sale from A. (Yes, I realize there's ways to finesse this particular scenario. It's an example.) There's nothing hijacked here, the space wasn't allocated to anyone other than A who for some reason, such as loss of a customer, doesn't want it any more. Are networks going to treat this the same as someone hijacking space and hosting malware or sending fake drug spam? Really? From what I can tell, unless a range is emitting actively annoying traffic, there's no pushback about routing it at all. R's, John PS: If you disagree, tell me about 130.105.0.0/16, which belongs to the long defunct Open Software Foundation.