[arin-ppml] Results of Transfer Proposal Survey

[John Santos]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2008, Jeremy H. Griffith wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:59:36 -0500, "Bill Darte" <BillD at cait.wustl.edu> wrote:
> 
> >No-one had to answer any question...therefore the could have skipped to
> >the bottom and said NO....
> >
> >but....to ask the question....
> >
> >All those against a liberalized transfer policy of any kind...please
> >reply saying so...
> 
> <raises hand/>  Me.  I'm one of those legacy Class C swamp dwellere.
> I have absolutely no intention of selling "my" addresses, and see
> no reason anyone else should either.  I can see justification for
> ARIN to offer incentives to those who don't need all they have,
> perhaps in the form of reduced fees.  But I do not think we as a
> community will benefit from making money replace need as a criterion 
> for address assignment.  That's privatization, not stewardship.
> 
> Personally, I don't meet the current ARIN criteria for need
> because I cannot justify half of a /22.  I'm not an LIR.  But
> I certainly can justify need for *some* PI space.  When this
> debate began, I seriously considered whether I could return
> part of my /24 to help; I could live with a /28.  But my main
> upstream dissuaded me on the grounds that nothing below a /24
> was routable, and therefore I would accomplish nothing.  I
> suspect that anyone with a legacy Class C is in the same boat.
> 
> As to supporting whois service, I've kept my contact info
> current since 1992.  The beneficiary of this service is *not*
> me; in fact, I tend to suffer for it, since I'm sure it's a
> source of spam.  But the *rest* of the community benefits
> from knowing who to call in case of trouble.  Charging me for
> this "service" seems like a more cynical manipulation than
> I believe ARIN capable of.  I hope.  ;-)
> 
> That means that for me, the LRSA has no benefit at all.  While
> $100/year isn't that much, it's about what I pay for ten domains
> at the moment.  And ARIN is hardly hurting for income; in an
> earlier thread, the problem was that ARIN wasn't spending fast 
> enough and was accumulating more surplus than the IRS allows
> for nonprofits!  So my $100 would make that problem worse... 
> or, it could go to an orphanage in Afghanistan I'm helping:
>   https://www.charityhelp.org/rawa
> 
> 
> --JHG <jhg at omsys.com>

Well said, Jeremy.  I wholeheartedly agree with 99% of this.

The only bit I'm not sure of is whether a liberalized transfer
market, would actually help the transition or not.  I have
no interest in selling my legacy Class C, and it seems pretty
clear that /24's would have little or no market value anyway,
but some sort of award for recycling /16's or larger might delay
hitting the *wall* for a while.  On the other hand, it might
produce a California electricity situation, where the rich get
richer and everyone else pays through the nose.  My instincts
say a market would result in rampant speculation, bubbles and
busts, and the ultimate concentration of wealth (i.e. addresses
and money paid for the use of them) and power in the hands of
the few, but I don't always trust my instincts in economic matters.


I currently use slight more than half of a /24, but if I
were to move local-only hosts to a private address range,
I could probably shrink to a /25 or /26, a few more than
Jeremy needs, but equally pointless.

In my situation, I need several dozen globally unique,
static addresses for connections with various customers.
All of them use RFC 1918 addressing internally and
independently of each other, and my addresses can't collide
with *any* of them.

Like Jeremy, I couldn't justify half of a /22, but I can justify
a /24 (with current usage) and even if I took heroic measures,
would still need at least a /26.

I've also kept my whois up to date, which may be one source of
the several hundred SPAMs I get every day.

There may be economies of scale, due the relatively small numbers
of RDNS domains, but commercial .com providers seem to be able
to maintain DNS profitably for about $10/year.  (Seems to me
that originally our domain from NETSOL was about $50/year, but
has come down a lot since then, but consumer-level domain providers
seem to charge even less.)  If ARIN feels it needs to charge $100
per year to keep things serious, maybe a portion (50%?) should
be donated to some worthwhile cause, maybe computer science
scholarships at some third-world university or providing Internet
service to elementary schools or hospitals in poor countries, if
we wan't to keep it somehow network or computer related.


-- 
John Santos
Evans Griffiths & Hart, Inc.
781-861-0670 ext 539