[arin-ppml] Deceased Companies?

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <CAMDXq5M-vxnk1Fscye1kxuMb1FFLesdX7HFGLg-qcPPe2fzAnw at mail.gmail.com>, 
Martin Hannigan <hannigan at gmail.com>u wrote:

>> There are a lot of things that ARIN should clearly not waste its time on.
>> Knowing whether its members are alive or dead is not one of them.
>
>
>How big [real] is the problem? One body? Or five hundred?

I had a premonition that someone might ask that.

The honest answer is:  I don't know.  But I can certainly imagine that
if some totally impartial party were to volunteer, then we could put
all of the handles for all of the ARIN member orgs into a hat, and then
have the impartial party draw from the hat, say, one hundred org handles
at random, and then those could all be scrutinized with an eye towards
detmining how many are clearly live, how many are clearly dead, and how
many are incorporated in jurisdictions where it is simply not possible
to tell.

The results from the random sample could then, I think, be extrapolated
to the universe of ARIN member orgs, thus producing estimates of total
live, total dead, and total indeterminate.

I certainly have every belief and faith that at the present moment there
is likely more than one ARIN membership that is associated with a dead
person or entity.  Consider that I appear to have found _two_ such, just
by sniffing around the edges of one particular clump of unambiguous online
anti-social nastiness that happened to cross my personal line-of-sight.
How many other dead members may there be out there that have avoided all
scrutiny from anyone, simply by keeping their heads down and doing nothing
which is controversial, remarkable, or even noteworthy.


Regards,
rfg