[arin-ppml] Legacy space holders were a big part of the community... i.e. all of it.

[John Curran]

On Aug 21, 2008, at 2:01 AM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> Paul
> One can make a good case for a unified, consistent address governance
> regime that would involve eliminating legacy holder's special rights  
> and
> bringing everyone in under the same kind of contract.

Equating absence of an agreement with "special rights" is interesting,
but that's probably best saved for another time.

> But one cannot make the case you want to make based on appeals to "the
> community" and "consensus." Because the legacy holders are part of  
> "the
> community." A big part of it, in North America. And I suspect that  
> they
> will never agree to be part of a "consensus" that eliminates their
> special status.

It is a very relevant point, since almost all of those same legacy
holders were certainly part of the consensus decision in 1993 to
change the basic IP address structure to allow variable sized
blocks (aka "CIDR") and the matching matching address allocation
policies (RFC1466/RFC1518/RFC1519).  These documents state that
an organization should receive sufficient address space to meet
two years worth of organization need, so that we could "delay
depletion of the IP address space".

The community of the legacy space allocation era actually already
reached consensus years ago that variable-sized blocks were needed
and that organizational allocations based on two years of need were
most appropriate. They just forgot to return their own extra space,
for reasons unknown, and at this point are best off if they can
simultaneously deny that they were part of the community that were
involved in these decisions but somehow were still part of the team
that earned their legacy allocation by helping build the Internet...
good luck with that.

/John
(most certainly speaking individually)