On 10/09/2012 20:24, David Farmer wrote:
So there are going to be dribs and drabs of IPv4 for a long time.
There will be dribs and drabs until the heat death of the universe. This will happen because there are garbage collection mechanisms built into the policies of all the RIRs, and every time an organisation or person disappears in such a way that there is no clear succession (e.g. bankruptcy, death, etc), the address space will eventually make its way back to IANA.
As I don't represent any resources in the RIPE region, I will not express an opinion on the policy itself. But I though it was import for people to realize there is more than a trivial amount of resources in the IANA Recovered IPv4 Pool even though it won't save the world from IPv4 exhaustion either.
This is part of the reason that this policy is important. The quantities are small in the scale of things, but the largest arguments are usually about the smallest things. We need policy clarity and some semblance of fairness in how these resources should be divvied up in future. Otherwise it will be to the detriment of the RIPE community in future. Nick