in addition to ideas stated here to take away our legacy IP allocations and give us /22s and force us to use NAT and reengineer our 10,000 node university networks
No idea where this idea came from. No-one has ever suggested this or even remotely implied it. Quite the opposite in fact.
Uh... I think this came from Message-ID: <503D6B00.7000605@elabnet.de>, from Michael Markstaller earlier in this thread, ref. http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2012-August/001738.ht... Just for the record: I consider his suggestion to be totally outlandish, just the notion that "all one needs at any one time as a user is a single NAT'ed socket" is so far out of touch with what consitutes "need" that the rest isn't really worthy of comments. However, just for the record, let me say this: the community really should accept that historical assignments should not be put into question, at least not as part of this discussion, also not at the present time, and it is somewhat doubtful that they ever can be. The only realistic and straight-forward way to re-claim legacy IPv4 address space is through voluntary surrender by the current holder. Therefore, I think I agree with what Daniel Karrenberg said about what the present discussion should be about, I'm quoting: So what we have to decide as a community is: under which policies does the RIPE community allow legacy space holders to register their address space in the RIPE Internet Number registry. Nothing more, nothing less. All other questions are secondary. Resolving conflicts about the holdership/use of the address space is a non issue. Past agreements about allocation of address space are a non issue. [...] (I have a question of terminology that I'll bring up in a separate message.) Best regards, - Håvard