Hi. My name is Hank Nussbacher and I am normally on the RIPE forums but
someone from APNIC suggested I raise this issue here.
I am part of a volunteer team along with Barry Greene and Terry Baranski
that contact Internet users (ISPs and corporates) when they start
announcing something wrong on the Internet. Recently, Geoff Huston updated
his CIDR report - http://bgp.potaroo.net/cidr/#Bogons and up popped a
number of APNIC customers that were announcing prefixes that were not
allocated in APNIC.
Turns out that the customers membership was "closed" and APNIC tried
contacting them with no success. APNIC waits about 90-120 days before
closing a member for non-payment. APNIC then sends an email informing the
upstream to stop announcing the IP range that has been reclaimed from the
closed member. Then they remove all the database objects which are related
to this organisation from the WHOIS database. After a one year period,
APNIC will start to reallocate/reassign that particular IP range to other
organisations.
The problem is that the upstream or even the customer themselves continue
to use the prefix and announce it to the Internet, thereby falling into the
Bogon category.
I think 90-120 days is too little before removing the inetnum object. I
also think that a better a tactic would be to add a "remarks" to the
inetnum or perhaps create a new "status" tag such as REVOKED. I also think
such a policy should be uniform between RIRs.