[address-policy-wg] Mega-allocations

Hi,

It seems there is a new trend in RIR-land: mega-allocations. This  
year APNIC, ARIN and the RIPE NCC have made the following allocations:

# whois -h whois 126.0.0.0 whois.apnic.net
inetnum:      126.0.0.0 - 126.255.255.255
netname:      BBTEC
descr:        Japan Nation-wide Network of Softbank BB Corp.
country:      JP
status:       ALLOCATED PORTABLE

# whois -h whois.arin.net 73.0.0.0
NetRange:   73.0.0.0 - 73.191.255.255
CIDR:       73.0.0.0/9, 73.128.0.0/10
NetName:    CABLE-1
NetType:    Direct Allocation

# whois -h whois.ripe.net 86.192.0.0
inetnum:      86.192.0.0 - 86.255.255.255
netname:      FR-TELECOM-20050302
descr:        France Telecom
status:       ALLOCATED PA

That's a total of 33 million IP addresses in 3 allocations (and as  
many months). The total population for these three countries is 127 +  
293 + 60 = 480 million, so that's an IP address for nearly 7% of  
those country's inhabitants.

If I were a conspiracy theorist I would think that IPv6 proponents  
are trying to burn up the remaining IPv4 space as fast as they can so  
we'll all be running IPv6 at the end of the decade. If that's the  
case: good job!  :-)

Seriously: what's going on here?