Hi David,

I think you are referring to 51/8, which belongs to the UK government via the Department of Work and Pensions (the UK Ministry of Defence also has 25/8).

Whilst not routed on the public internet (for want of a better term), a big chunk of 51/8 (~70%) is used internally on the UK government's private networks such as the PSN, but some unused chunks of the unused space were sold off last year. It's also worth noting that this is legacy space that predates the RIRs and so isn't really subject to any modern policies.

There are plenty of similar sized legacy IPv4 blocks allocated to various world government organisations (mainly the US) and private companies, but you're not going to be able to recover them and even if you did they would only delay the inevitable for a little while.

As others have said, you're never going to be able to stop such transfers happening (simple market forces), so it's much better to have them happen transparently in public under RIR policies with the details documented in the registry than have shady, undocumented backroom deals.

This has all been rehashed several times before and I'm afraid that I can't see any reason that the conclusions would be any different this time, but if you have something new that will change things then by all means put together a policy proposal.

Edward Dore 
Freethought Internet 

On 27 May 2016, at 09:34, David Benwell <dave@it-communicationsltd.co.uk> wrote:

Hi,
 
With IPv4 running out and LIRs only being allowed final /22 in my view makes it unfair to new members who may need additional addresses.
 
With some of the other LIRs having for example /19 unused makes it unfair for them to advertise their unused address space on the transfer service and want to charge up words of £8 per IP Address.
 
Given the fact the IP Addresses is a public resource, I fail to see how it should be allowed for LIRs to make a profit out of unused space.
 
There should be a policy and if the address space is not used / required, it must be handed back to the public pool of resources so can then be allocated to other LIRS as part of their annual membership.
 
I even recall the Government sitting on “I believe” a /8 and then tried to sell this off to raise money. Again this should not be allowed. LIRS should NOT be able to make profit for selling a public resource.
 
 
Regards
Dave
 
 
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Dave Benwell - 
3CX Certified Professional
 
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