[arin-discuss] [ppml] Counsel statement on Legacy assignments?

[Ron Cleven]

>>In any case, I give up.  There appear to be some people in 
>>this discussion that are shilling for legacy interests and 
>>large entrenched ISP's.  I suspect they have all the cards 
>>and all the power (and almost all the IP's).  As it it 
>>currently operating, ARIN is complicit in this atrocious 
>>anti-competitive behavior.
> 
> 
> I'm not sure who you think is shilling for legacy interests and large
> entrenched ISP's.
> 
> My viewpoint is that as an IPv4 legacy address holder, ARIN has never
> asked me to pay fees and so I haven't paid any fees for my IPv4
> addresses.  When ARIN comes up with a reasonable RSA and reasonable fees
> for IPv4 legacy address holders, I don't expect to have an issue with
> signing and paying. For the record, I only have a /24, am not an ISP,
> and don't represent any ISP. I suspect that my viewpoint is similar to
> that of some number of other small IPv4 legacy address holders, but
> don't know that for sure.

I stand corrected.  I would not expect legacy holders with a small 
number of ip's to care much either way.  More precisely, I should have 
said "large legacy interests and large entrenched ISP's".  I am curious 
though to hear you elaborate more about two points:

1) What would you consider a "reasonable" RSA?
2) You also referred to "reasonable" fees.  Would you have any problem 
with having those fees scaled according to the number of IP's?  Are you 
suggesting / expecting a different fee schedule for legacy-holders?

While I was happy when I first started reading some of the postings on 
this list to see several people indicate support for per-IP pricing to 
instill some market discipline on the IPV4 space, I was surprised to see 
some of the militant opposition to it.

As a small ISP, I would never pay for more IP's than I needed to support 
my customer base.  If you have been living with relatively static IP 
space for many years, I don't think you understand the capricious nature 
of the current ARIN administration of IPV4 space.  Rather than letting 
market forces influence the number of IP's allocated, they force you 
through a series of detailed and antiquated templates, even requiring 
you in some instances to reveal sensitive customer lists.

If, instead, ARIN required you to pay some larger up-front license fee 
for each allocation (scaled by size), then perhaps a smaller annual 
maintenance fee per IP, those administration problems would be radically 
diminished.  If licensee's could retire the space for the same serious 
fee they paid up-front, market forces would greatly reduce the 
administrative oversight needed.

A list of, say, the top 1000 holders (followed by a line for "All 
Others") of IPV4 allocations within ARIN's purview (sorted by number of 
IP's allocated) of roughly the following format, would bring clarity to 
this discussion.  I don't really care whether there is an asterisk added 
indicating a legacy holder, because I don't think that is relevant to 
the discussion.  Perhaps such a table already exists or is easily 
derivable from some public information.

Number of IP's     Entity Name      Entity Type (ISP, University, etc.)
==============     ===========      ===========

                    <All Others>
==============     ===========
<Total IP's>       <Total Entities>

This coupled with another table describing number of IP's in use at the 
end of recent years and the number ARIN has remaining to allocate would 
allow some useful cogitation about the matter.

Year    Number of IP's Allocated    Number of IP's Remaining
====    ========================    ========================
2007    (projected)
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000

The reason I am looking for authoritative information in these areas is 
that I have seen several serious discussions of these issues with wildly 
differing statistical assumptions.  I don't know who to believe.



> 
> Another viewpoint is that there may be enough unused IPv4 space in some
> of the large IPv4 legacy address holders to ward off the IPv4 runout for
> a couple of months, in which case it might be worth attempting to
> reclaim some of the unused address space.
> 
> Then there is Dean Anderson's position, which seems to be based on past
> injustices.  Typically, I don't understand Dean's positions or the 20
> years of history behind those positions. 
> 
> In the six months or so that I've been watching the ARIN PPML and now
> the ARIN-Discuss lists, I've seen a number of people attempting to come
> up with reasonable solutions to the issues.  There is also some amount
> of emotion, quick answers to the wrong questions, off-the-topic
> digressions, etc.
> 
> As far as I can tell, the people who have the most influence are the
> people who put together coherent, well written proposals, regardless of
> the size of their employer.