In message <5C133E8B-8390-48F8-93D3-1F5AB641BEAC@rfc1035.com>, at 10:46:23 on Mon, 22 Sep 2014, Jim Reid <jim@rfc1035.com> writes
On 22 Sep 2014, at 10:34, Roland Perry <roland@internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:
If so, then the IANA table should be clearly annotated so that people know that the "Designation" for these non-RIR legacy entries is the name of the organisation that the allocation was *originally* made to.
That just provides other sticks: "what happened to 16/8 after DEC died?",
That's Richard Hill's question, and the answer has to lie somewhere within the successor companies to whom various aspects of the business were transferred/sold. If it was broken up, then perhaps the listing should be removed from IANA's /8 table, and re-documented in smaller fragments to relevant RIRs. If it's still under one entity's overall control, why can't IANA tell us [ARIN knows, it's claimed].
"why is Stanford University listed as holding 28/8 when it no longer uses that space?", "when will MIT hand back 18/8?" etc, etc.
As far as I know both of those still exist, and maybe the listed contacts are even traceable (I haven't tried, but it seems more likely than the other examples here). Questions like "why does MIT have more address space than the whole of China" would be even harder to debunk if MIT had in fact ceased to exist, and this wasn't recorded somewhere easy-to-find at IANA. -- Roland Perry