You must be aware that he owns the allocation in exactly the same way you "own" an ARIN allocation? Unless you have an exemption, there are fees that you must p

You must be aware that he owns the allocation in exactly the same way you "own" an ARIN allocation? Unless you have an exemption, there are fees that you must pay annually [0]. If you do not pay them, you relinquish your assignment. [1] There's another sense in which he owns the allocation... the one you constructed in your original question: Do you actually own that /48? The problem with using the globally routable addresses internally is that your public /48 might change in the future, and and that will force you to change a bunch of internal stuff. He's paying his money to get a statically assigned /48. It's not too surprising that you can't get this information out of a whois invocation. It is -however- a bit surprising that you weren't aware that whois couldn't tell you this. [0] <https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#rsp-service-categories-and-fees https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#rsp-servic...> [1] See section 4(c) of <https://www.arin.net/about/corporate/agreements/rsa.pdf https://www.arin.net/about/corporate/agreements/rsa.pdf>