[ARIN-consult] Consultation on ARIN Fees

[William Herrin]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2021 at 2:34 PM John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
> <chuckle> There are not a lot of folks willing to argue in a court that they have some hypothecated rights to ARIN’s registry database – particularly after the USG facilitated transition and specifically indicated that "Creation of ARIN will give the users of IP numbers (mostly Internet service providers, corporations and other large institutions) a voice in the policies by which they are managed and allocated within the North American region.”  <https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=102819>

Hi John,

Not a lot of folks indeed. But if you encounter one, I recommend
against employing this bit of sophistry before a judge. If ARIN's all
about the community of IP address users then it's the community's
database, not ARINs. As the monopoly steward of the community's
database, you may find ARIN has legal obligations to accuracy
regardless of whether it has a contractual basis for enforcing other
policies. Or that monopoly product tying between stewardship of
database accuracy and stewardship of resource management is not
allowed.

In the meantime, reserving the right to make that argument and more in
court is frankly more valuable than the de facto null rights granted a
registrant under the LRSA. In my opinion.


> In the case of Norte/Microsoft, the parties agreed to condition the sale on compliance with ARIN’s policies and Microsoft’s entry into an RSA with ARIN – ARIN concurred only after this condition was established

The policies at the time called for the recipient of the sale to enter
into "the" RSA, not "an" RSA. Moreover, it called for the legacy
registrant to sign the LRSA, then initiate a specified transfer to the
new registrant who would receive them under the RSA following a
successful justified needs analysis. Did I miss the part where the
Nortel bankruptcy trustees signed the LRSA on Nortel's behalf? As near
as I could tell, Microsoft directly became the registrant under the
LRSA bypassing the formal transfer step from one contracted party to
another.

ARIN smoothed the path.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin
bill at herrin.us
https://bill.herrin.us/