It's the other way round: SPRINT should tell his customers he can't guarantee 100% global Internet connectivity because he disagrees with the current address allocation policy of the IANA/InterNIC/RIPE NCC/AP-NIC. They might want to look for a different transit provider...
That assumes that Sprint is, in fact, the root problem here. The root problem is that lots of routers will be running out of space to store routes soon, and that *everyone* soon will be seeing the problems. Sprint perhaps a little earlier than the rest, hence them leading the effort to correct policies, but they are not alone. We are now closer to running out of Router capability than IP numbers to hand out. A rational solution to that would be to allocate IP space in a manner such that we don't run out of Router capability before we run out of IP space, by assigning easier-to-route, larger CIDR blocks to large providers, and allowing growth space in allocations so that small allocations can grow without having to add more announcements. If the allocating agencies continue to insist on being as sparing as possible with block allocations, which is noticably increasing routing problems, then we are going to face Internet partitions sooner rather than later, based on router load rather than running out of IP space. This is, in my opinion, a poor choice for overall growth. -george william herbert gherbert@crl.com