Why don't they publish a more detailled explanation field in each IANA allocation record so that they can explain the precise status of each block?
IANA's role in this should be 'Ugh. Here Big Block. Go Talk to RIR.'
I was referring to the cases where they don't say that. For instance, the text file has 4 columns. Address Block and Date are pretty clear and straightforward. The last two fields, however are explicitly ambiguous. One is entitled "Registry - Purpose" and the other is labelled "Notes or Reference". And immediate improvement would be a whois server that serves up 6 data items per entry such as: AddressBlock: 010 Date: Jun 95 Registry: None Purpose: Private Use Notes: Reference: RFC1918 In the case of 7/8, that Notes field could contain a couple sentences to explain the unusual situation of that block. If course, it would be good to add a few other fields there as well, such as Whois: whois://ws.arin.net:43 in order to provide a referral chain as one person mentioned. Or, maybe all this is already defined in the RIR database schemas and IANA should just adopt the same schema. Note that for some blocks, useful additional info could be placed there such as: AddressBlock: 019 Date: May 95 Registry: None Purpose: Direct Assignment Notes: Ford Motor Company Reference: Whois: whois://ws.arin.net:43 FINET which gives the RIR holding additional info and the NetName tag to use when looking it up there. The bottom line is that lots of organizations, not just ISPs, want to see a complete and up-to-date picture of the status of the entire IPv4 space (and Ipv6 space someday) because criminals are using hijacked IP addresses to hide their identities. They believe that the whois directories, collectively, should identify the organization who has administrative control of any IP address and should lead to a technical contact who is ready, willing and able to act when informed about network issues, whether they are abuse issues or some other technical problem. The current whois system has no authoritative root leading to large gaps in the data. And the lack of a root means that the 5 RIRs all do different things, leading to large amounts of garbage data in the system. Even when this data accurately identifies an organization, it often turns out that the organization either doesn't have administrative control over its network or else they have no technical contacts who are ready, willing and able to act when contacted. I believe that fixing the IANA issues will lead to the others being addressed. --Michael Dillon