Peter Beckman wrote:
How about a trial period from ARIN? You get your IP block, and you get 30 days to determine if it is "clean" or not. Do some testing, check the blacklists, do some magic to see if there are network-specific blacklists that might prevent your customers from sending or receiving email/web/other connections with that new IP block.
If there are problems, go back to ARIN and show them your work and if they can verify your work (or are simply lazy) you get a different block. ARIN puts the block into another quiet period. Maybe they use the work you did to clean up the block, maybe they don't.
Cleaning up a block of IPs previously used by shady characters has a real cost, both in time and money. The argument as I see it is who bears the responsibility and cost of that cleanup.
I encourage someone to write a policy proposal; I'd support it. They (the recipient) didn't have a darn thing to do with it becoming a wasteland and shouldn't bear the cost. Unlike bying a (insert your favorite object here), you can't inspect an IP block before purchase. I fear that "we don't guarantee routability" will rear its ugly head even if someone were to pen an awesome policy. I feel it's a poor position for a registry to take, though. They still get the money even if you can't use them, and uh oh, looks like you won't qualify for more until you use the unusable. Probably getting off topic for NANOG, like most threads that get this long. ~Seth