The following was posted to APNIC without much comment. Since RIPErs are more outspoken, I'd like to raise it here as a possible idea for implementation.

I am part of a volunteer team along with Barry Greene and Terry Baranski that contact Internet users (ISPs and corporates) when they start announcing something wrong on the Internet. Recently, Geoff Huston updated his CIDR report - http://bgp.potaroo.net/cidr/#Bogons and up popped a number of APNIC customers that were announcing prefixes that were not allocated in APNIC.

Turns out that the customers membership was "closed" and APNIC tried contacting them with no success. APNIC waits about 90-120 days before closing a member for non-payment. APNIC then sends an email informing the upstream to stop announcing the IP range that has been reclaimed from the closed member. Then they remove all the database objects which are related to this organisation from the WHOIS database. After a one year period, APNIC will start to reallocate/reassign that particular IP range to other organisations.

The problem is that the upstream or even the customer themselves continue to use the prefix and announce it to the Internet, thereby falling into the Bogon category.

I think 90-120 days is too little before removing the inetnum object. I also think that a better a tactic would be to add a "remarks" to the inetnum or perhaps create a new "status" tag such as REVOKED. I also think such a policy should be uniform between RIRs.

Comments?

-Hank