Thus spake "Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve@telecomplete.co.uk>
N companies can have up to N(N-1) interconnections, which requires either: a) double NAT, with a single address range for all interconnects b) no NAT, with a unique address range for each interconnect c) very careful management of the RFC1918 space such that no two companies talking have a collision d) globally unique addresses for each participant using RIRs
(c) simply doesn't work in reality, (b) is no better than (d), and (a) is beyond ugly not to mention incompatible with many apps.
Only because everyone seems to use 10.0.0.x ... of course if you only followed the guidelines, rtfm!
If I need several thousand subnets, and my business partners need several thousand subnets each, then odds are we're going to collide if there's no entity coordinating things -- and that doesn't consider all of my business partners' partners. Gosh, what you need is an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority to make sure no two organizations used the same part of the address space. I bet you could devise a system where organizations applied for the amount of space they need, which would be verified by an impartial authority, and the results would be published in a whois server. Of course, this sounds like a lot of work, so you'd probably establish regional registries to do this... Either you use globally unique addresses, or you use NAT. It's that simple. No other solution scales.
I dont know the policies very well but are you sure they cant revoke dead allocations? For RIR assigned space I thought this was covered, so your issue was with the legacy pre-RIR swamp?
Under current reclamation programs, an unannounced legacy allocation is only reclaimed if the tenant organization fails to respond. There is no process for revoking a legacy allocation that is in use, whether announced or not, whether efficiently used or not. Likewise, I am not aware of ARIN revoking any non-legacy allocations for any reason other than failure to pay rent^Wfees.
And it cant be that big a deal to make legacy blocks fall into the new rules...
You might as well revoke all pre-RIR allocations, it'd be a lot simpler than doing the research to find 99% of them don't meet RFC2050 requirements. Now, you can debate the ethics of requiring new organizations to meet a different standard, but that's another thread. S Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking