The only effect that threats from ARIN would have in this
situation is to make the situation worse. HP uses the address
space internally. Transition to a different address space
where they are behind a NAT has real costs for them. They are
only going to make the transition if they can recover those costs.
HP has nothing to worry about threats from ARIN. It is the threat of
lawsuits from large ISPs who have been working within the ARIN rules,
that HP should worry about. If the situation arises that ARIN cannot
supply a large ISP with the addresses that it needs, and that large ISP
suspects that HP has more addresses than they can justfy under ARIN's
policy, the the large ISP will sue HP.
HP is in a very risky postion here if they cannot meet ARIN's
requirements for justifying their address allocation. The wise move for
HP is to audit their addresses, bring themselves into compliance with
ARIN's policies, return the surplus addresses to ARIN and sign a
Registration Services Agreement (RSA).
I suspect that the main reason why HP is in this position is that the
people who manage IPv4 addresses within HP have been flying below the
radar of senior management. In HP and many other companies around the
world, IP addressing is about to come to the attention of senior
management for the first time. I would not bet that senior management
views these issues in quite the same way as their network engineers do.
--Michael Dillon
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