Owen,
Of course, there is the possibility (probability) of this, but that would be stupid as the costs of maintaining companies would exceed CGN or other methods to alleviate the need.
Maintaining? Once you do the merge, there’s no need to maintain.
Standing up a shell company is pretty cheap and easy in most places. I’m sure there’s at least one country somewhere in the APNIC region where this is true. If there’s no stricture on M&A acquisitions of 103/8 space, not even a minimal time limit, then I would argue it’s pretty hard to distinguish this activity from “real M&A” on a policy basis. After all, a real company (albeit a shell company, this is very hard to detect) is applying for and receiving space and then “really” being “acquired” by the “independent” organization that spun it up in the first place. On paper it’s 100% legitimate normal business practice and it’s virtually impossible to distinguish this from (e.g. 3Com spinning off Palm and then later acquiring it, then spinning it off where it was eventually acquired by HP).
I agree that 5 years is way too long and exceeds the useful delay here, but I think that a 24 month waiting period after acquiring is not at all unreasonable.
Owen
The issue here is that APNIC needs to be satisfied it is a real M&A, which should not be that hard to do.