[ARIN-consult] Consultation on ARIN Fees

[Owen DeLong]

> On Jul 21, 2021, at 14:32 , Adam Thompson <athompso at athompso.net> wrote:
> 
> On 2021-07-21 16:15, William Herrin wrote:
>> Unless you're planning to change ARIN's quarter-century practice of
>> risk aversion toward letting cases proceed to the point where a court
>> sets a precedent about the shape of the pre-ARIN registrants' rights?
>> I know Owen remembers how far ARIN bent in Microsoft/Nortel to reach
>> an agreement, any agreement, rather than let the court set precedent
>> with respect to what it could do with Nortel's legacy registration.
> 
> I would like to point out that in this regard, I do not believe ARIN is accurately representing its members' interests.  Perhaps the megacorps that dominate this industry like every other do enjoy the current status, but I know both I, and many other smaller registrants I've spoken over the years, would much prefer that jurisprudence exists, even if it's unfavourable.
> 
> Losing flexibility is a problem, but living in fear is also a problem, and not knowing the real legal status of things like "can legacy registrants claim any rights over IP addresses" is (i.e. not just what the [L]RSA says), is also a problem.  Contracts are not law, and do not have the force of law, until tested.

It’s a lot more complicated than that and I can speak much more freely since June 8.

The simple fact of the matter is that reliance on the RIR system for uniqueness of addresses is entirely voluntary and the fact that most ISPs adhere to that system is the only thing that gives it power.

If a sufficient critical mass of major ISPs decided to wrest control from the RIR system, they could do it in a heart beat simply by creating their own registry and adhering to that instead of the RIR system.

The RIR system has no basis in law and no legal authority over what integers any given individual types into any given router. They even make this very clear when they tell you that your RIR's allocation/assignment is not guaranteed to be routable.

The whole thing is a giant house of cards and the only thing that keeps it from collapsing is that they behave just well enough that the alternatives are all too much disruption for too little gain.

Owen