On Apr 13, 2010, at 8:31 AM, Nigel Titley wrote:
... Some background may be helpful here. No one seriously expected that any address space would actually be returned as a result of this policy. It was intended as a statement that should IPv4 address space become available then it would be used for the greater good of all the registries rather than those who had already had the majority of the space already. I realise that this was a rather pious hope, but we felt that it was worth making a statement about.
Nigel - The RIPE 2009-1/ARIN 2009-3 global policy proposal has also provisions which provide for a clear process for reallocation of recovered address space returned to the IANA, and these aspects of the global policy are quite likely useful independent of the policy as a "statement" of unity about returning recovered address space. It's important to note that the term "recovered address space" includes both voluntarily returned space as well as space reclaimed due to legal action or abuse determination, and hence it's not unreasonable to think that there will be resources put into the recovered address space pool if this policy is globally adopted (even in the absence of voluntarily returned space). The ARIN community identified that the decision to return recovered address space to the IANA is a local (not global) policy decision. ARIN's present practice has been to return to the IANA any significant address space which was voluntarily returned to ARIN (for examples, see the following writeup: <http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/>) and until a new ARIN policy is established, we will continue that practice. If the other regions adopt their respective policy proposals, we will have an outcome operationally very similar to the original proposal, but with regional policy control over what gets returned to IANA. As you note, that fails as a unified statement of greater good, but each region should also consider if the resulting global policy would result in a useful outcome despite this failing. /John John Curran President and CEO ARIN