[ARIN-consult] Consultation - Transfer Listing Service

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> 1. How long should ARIN offer a Transfer Listing Service and 
> what, if any, conditions should be tied to its availability?

No time limit. It can be shut down whenever the BoT thinks that
the need has gone away. The only condition to listing should
be that the organization holding the addresses has an RSA
or LRSA in effect with ARIN and is in good standing. If ARIN
staff believe that the holder of the address block would not
meet all the policy conditions for transfer until a certain
date, then ARIN should include that date in the listing.

> 2. As proposed, there is a usage agreement for participation. 
> Is this a fair and reasonable requirement?

Ground rules are a good idea. But the fundamentals should
be to only list those with an RSA or LRSA.

> 3. Under what conditions should ARIN disallow or remove 
> either an organization listing or seeking IPv4 address space 
> from the service? For example, if an organization has a 
> Registration Services Agreement
> ("RSA") with ARIN and is not current on payments with ARIN, 
> should they be allowed to participate?

Yes, if an organization falls behind in its payments the
listings should be removed. Similarly if an organization is
found to have violated their RSA or LRSA.

> 4. Should there be a fee associated with the Transfer Listing Service?
> If so, on what factors should the fee be based?

No fee whatsoever. The listing should be something like a simplified
whois directory that responds to queries on IP address, org name,
contact name, and similar. And there should be an option to list
all entries with a reasonable choice to have it sorted by date listed,
size of block, etc. And it should have a RESTful interface.

> 5. Are there any other factors that ARIN should consider in 
> providing this service?

Yes. The listing should be minimalist and every page displayed should
have a bold disclaimer that ARIN warrants nothing except that the
organization listing the block for transfer does currently hold that
block under ARIN rules and is currently in good standing with ARIN.

Fundamentally, this listing service should not be about matching
buyers and sellers, but about allowing third party sites such
as eBay to determine whether an organization has a legitimate
right to the block which they wish to transfer. To facilitate this
the listing should allow the organization to list a reasonable amount
of contact info of any type such as:
Means: telephone Contact Info: (803)555-1234
Means: AIM       Contact Info: MrLikerBiker
Means: ebay      Contact Info: ISPYardSale007

It might be good to supplement this with some means of listing
contact info for eligible acquirers of a transfer under ARIN
rules so that eBay, for instance, could verify that a bidder
can actually complete the transaction.

The intent is to keep ARIN in the business of publishing 
correct, known facts about IP address ranges, and out of
the business of buying and selling. Note that although I
used eBay as an example, I would expect that if transfers
ever really got going, there would be at least one specialised
site for IP address transfers, and probably two or three 
brokers doing occasional deals. ARIN doesn't need to be
in that kind of business and should draw the line fairly
sharply which is why I suggest a minimalist listing
service more or less modeled on the idea of a whois directory
subset.

--Michael Dillon