IPv6 mistakes, was: Re: Looking for an IPv6 naysayer...

[owen at delong.com (Owen DeLong)]

On Feb 18, 2011, at 2:54 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> On 17 feb 2011, at 18:57, John Curran wrote:
> 
>> Actually, as I have noted before, the US DoD has contractually 
>> agreed to return to ARIN unneeded IPv4 address space if/when
>> such becomes available, so that it may be used by the Internet
>> community.
> 
> How can they "return" stuff to ARIN that they got from IANA in the first place?
> 
> ARIN seems to be getting the very long end of the legacy stick.

The same way people have returned to ARIN resources obtained from:
	SRI Internic
	Network Solutions Internic

ARIN is the successor registry and maintains the whois and in-addr data
for the blocks. An attempt to return them to IANA directly would probably be
met with a "go return these to ARIN" response. I don't know that for sure,
but, that is what I would expect.

As to ARIN getting the long end of the legacy stick, well, the ARIN region
got the long end of the costs of developing and making the early deployments
of the Internet, so, many of the legacy allocations and assignments are
within the ARIN region. This is simple historical fact. I'm not sure why anyone
feels we should attempt to revise history.

Owen