[arin-ppml] ARIN's Authority - One view (was: Re: LRSA concerns)

Sat Aug 23 12:55:40 EDT 2008

John and Bill:

Thank you for the historical look at the relationship between ARIN, the IANA
and the Legacy address space.  With that history, well defined and
documented, why is ARIN now so interested in brining the legacy holders
"into the fold?"  What purpose does it serve?

1) Extend the life of IPv4 - opinions vary, but most data seems to suggest
that even the best case scenario if all space was returned is that it won't
extend it by much (6 months, 1 year?)

2) Normalize WHOIS and in-addr.arpa information - I question whether an LRSA
or any other policy is really needed here.  As many have pointed out, there
is no commonality of the old records; some have invalid contact info but are
still valid, some have totally invalid info, some are routed and some
aren't, etc.  With this many discrepancies, and with the historical
reference presented by Bill and John, better policy would seem to be a broad
statement of "we want WHOIS and in-addr.arpa to be accurate" and then build
the tools to help with the process, and understand that there is still going
to be a lot of bad information.  Such is life.

3) Protect against future litigation - the line of thinking seems to be "if
everyone is under a common structure then we can approach litigation in a
common way."  I disagree.  If we have nothing but a services-based
relationship with the legacy holders then we have nothing to defend against.
The big question to my mind is whether or not we've already gone too far
down the rabbit hole to go back to the original relationship with the legacy
holders.

I would like to see ARIN focus on the end-game of IPv4 and the adoption of
IPv6, both through policy and press.  I think all of the efforts to
manipulate and control IPv4 space are, as Randy put it, just rearranging the
deck chairs on the Titanic, and presents a picture to the public that there
are ways to artificially extend the life of IPv4.  It would be better if
ARIN said "IPv4 is on its way out, we'll manage what we have left, but we're
not going to work at extending its natural life."

Regards,

Mike

On 8/23/08 8:59 AM, "John Curran" <jcurran at istaff.org> wrote:

> On Aug 23, 2008, at 10:40 AM, William Herrin wrote:
>> 
> 
>> What's more, the presentations made to gain the community consensus
>> that led to NCR-9218742's amendment 6 repeatedly promised that what
>> came to be known as the legacy registrations would remain untouched by
>> ARIN except to provide whois and rdns services.
>> http://rip.psg.com/~randy/970414.fncac.pdf is was such a presentation,
>> made to the FNC in support of ARIN's formation. See page 9,
>> specifically: "Current and old allocations and their DNS will be
>> maintained with no policy changes"
> 
> You're right!  That presentation was made after adoption of RFC 2050,
> which specifically calls for invalidation of existing assignments which
> are no longer needed.
> 
> No change to address management policy was implied by creation of ARIN;
> the same address blocks that were obtained via US government auspices
> so that one could to participate in the Internet and Internet Protocol
> development were already covered by this policy in place at the time.
> 
>> Inclusion of that statement was no mistake. "The Community" insisted
>> on it.
> 
> Correct!
> 
>> We're left with: no explicit grant of authority over the legacy
> 
>> registrations, and the historical documents that do talk about it
>> suggest that the intention was to -not- grant such authority.
> 
> I'm sorry, why did you expect such? Your allocations were always made
> under the authority of the IANA and based on your need for address
> space.
> The fact that we corrected the address subnet boundaries to allow for
> a better fit (CIDR) was the only major change, and if you happen to have
> been sitting on a "class A" or class B address block, it sure would have
> been nice if you returned the excess space which was provided to you
> due to this technical flaw in the original block allocation sizes.  The
> reasons that some organizations did not are varied, and mostly related
> to
> pain of renumbering, sparse allocation, and similar technical issues
> [ref: <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2071.html>]
> 
>>> Frankly, I'd rather not think about this, and hope that this
>>> particular chain of succession remain nothing more than an
>>> interesting historical tidbit best ignored.
>> 
>> You'll get no argument from me on this point.
>> 
>> However, when v4 depletion is reached you'll find yourself under
>> pressure to reclaim the fallow address space, however little it may
>> be. To do so successfully you'll need to first normalize relations
>> with the registrants whose legacy space is still in service. The only
>> two ways you do that without creating a godawful mess for yourself are
>> to either seek an explicit grant of authority from the USG that
>> supersedes the old community agreements
> 
> The first direction above (reliance upon "authority") doesn't follow the
> principles of industry self-governance, and should be avoided at all
> costs.
> There's an fairly large "mess" whether one relies upon existing
> delegation
> of authority or whether one attempts to refresh it in some manner.
> 
>> -OR- convince the vast majority of legacy registrants to voluntarily
>> sign contracts with ARIN so that when you declare the rest of the
>> space
>> dead and expired there's no one left to raise a stink.
> 
> The second direction above is the correct one (IMHO), although I expect
> there'll always be someone left to "raise a stick" and ARIN must
> prepared
> accordingly if we're directed by the community to do anything with
> respect
> to legacy address reclamation.
> 
>> ..
>> ARIN's authority and autonomy derive from the *strong* consensus of
>> the community it serves. That autonomy will end when ARIN places
>> itself at the center of a dispute that results in a fall to weak
>> consensus and the defection of any significant minority of that
>> community.
> 
> 
> We aim to please.  If the consensus of the Internet community in the
> ARIN
> region is to undertake some action here, then we will very likely do so.
> It should be made very clear that ARIN serves the entire Internet
> community
> in the ARIN region, and not simply those who have taken the time and
> effort
> to participate as members.  It is that reality which 1) causes ARIN to
> undertake more outreach than might otherwise be expected, and 2) makes
> the
> measurement of consensus for the "ARIN region Internet community" quite
> difficult.
> 
> /John
> (my opinions only; 100% of the electrons used in this email are from
>   recycled matter)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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