INTERVIEW comments by Conrad

[David Conrad]

Trevor,

To be clear, I never gave an interview to Baptista (even the idea what he is
a reporter is laughable, see http://www.kkc.net/baptista/ or his
'contributions' to the ICANN mailing lists as to why).  What I did do
(stupid me) is respond to an erroneous assertion of his (among various other
innuendos and insinuations) on the cybertelecom mailing list (is a mailing
list a conference?), specifically, Baptista stated:

>>> according to ARIN the smallest allocation has a rental value of $2,500 USD
>>> per year.

I merely pointed out that the registries do not revoke allocations if an
organization does not pay the allocation fee.  The fees charged by the
registries are for the service of allocation and are approved by the
memberships of the registries.  The fee, at least historically, has not been
a "rental".

Now, with respect to your mail:

On 9/23/02 7:22 AM, "Trevor Paquette" <Trevor.Paquette at TeraGo.ca> wrote:
> I've always thought that IP space was a luxury, not a right.

(As an aside, the assertion I was responding was in the context of valuation
of address space.)

I tend to view IP space as niether.  IP space is an abstraction that has
value depending on context.  Address space obtained from a regional registry
has value in its uniqueness.  ISPs can provide additional value to those
unique addresses by routing them.  On the other hand, what is the value of
10/8?

IP space (v4 or v6) are merely integers.  The service of insuring uniqueness
and routability provide value to those integers.  One can argue that both of
those value inducing properties are luxuries and I'm sure someone will argue
they are rights, but that is not an argument I'd be interested in getting
into.

> I would like to have David Conrad expound on his statments
> here..

Hope this clarifies things.  Note that Baptista is in my loon filter (a
necessary evil when you get as much email as I do), so responses may be
delayed if his email address shows up in the headers.

> What is ARIN actively doing to RECLAIM IP space??

This question would be more appropriately directed at ARIN staff (who will
jump in, if what I say is in error).  However, my understanding is that
efforts are actively underway to "clean" the database as a first step.  Of
course, attempting to 'reclaim' address space from someone unwilling to give
it up (and who has contractual agreements with ISPs to route the space) will
be the tricky part.  As roughly 45% of the address space (according to the
weekly routing table analysis sent out by APNIC) has not been allocated,
rushing into lawsuits is probably not what ARIN needs to do right now
(IMHO).

Rgds,
-drc