[ppml] Incentive to legacy address holders

[Brian Reid]

I am a legacy address holder.
I didn't even know this until Leo Bicknell explained the concept to me last week. Until then I just thought I had a /24 that I was issued by Kim Hubbard of nic.ddn.mil in February 1992 that I've been using and depending on ever since.

Since I've had a "legacy" assignment, I didn't think I needed to know or care much about ARIN when it was founded, except to be suspicious of it out of fear that it might be like ICANN. I think I had 3 or maybe 4 beers with Jon Postel over the years, and I met Joyce Reynolds a couple of times. I was a peripheral member of a long-gone community, and the creation of ARIN was politics that I didn't watch.

I spent years wondering if I would someday be sent an invoice for my /24. I had a vague notion of what an RIR is, enough to realize that whatever an RIR was, I didn't need to care.

I got another /24 in December 1993, this time from "netreg at internic.net", which I haven't used as much, and which is not currently routed because I work around people who are forever worrying that the core routing tables are too big, so as my small contribution to draining the swamp, I don't announce routes to it outside my house and my brother's house in Maine.

If anybody ever tried to force my hand by cutting off in-addr delegation, I would do my best to fight back and fight dirty. If you shoot first, then you deserve what happens to you.

Despite having been subscribed to PPML for months, I have no idea what an RSA is, though I know both Rivest and Adleman. If it is non-threatening and doesn't contain dangerous clauses that might cause me to lose my allocation, either by having it taken away from me or by raising the price to something that I could no longer afford, I'd probably be willing to sign it.

What I want, and what I suspect that others like me would want, is something like a New York rent-controlled lease, that gives me safety by putting a lid on rent hikes, and lets me keep it as long as I continue to live there.  I don't have the slightest idea what it costs these days to get a /24, or if it's even possible.

I just used a search engine to look up "arin rsa" and I see what that is. Whether or not I'd be willing to sign such a thing would depend entirely on whether or not I trusted ARIN, which at the moment I do. I intensely distrust ICANN because of its imperial secrecy, and I've seen it behave badly for  years; I have a vague fear that ARIN might drift towards becoming like ICANN, but as long as ARIN remains a trustworthy and relatively transparent and non-corrupt organization, I think I would have 
no issue in signing an RSA.

The problem is just one of education. I've never needed to know or care about any of this stuff, and before I sign anything I need to know what it means. I can't understand what an ARIN RSA means without understanding ARIN and its place in the world, which means I have to learn a lot more about global politics than I'm accustomed to doing in a year not divisible by 4.

Brian Reid
Palo Alto, California, USA