[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal 2008-6

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> head in sand and you expect to see things?  well, to have it 
> rubbed in your nose, see 
> http://rosie.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-57/presentations/uplo
> ads/Tuesday/Address%20Policy%202/upl/van_Mook-2007-08_v3.fx3k.pps

This is anecdotal evidence. Only two anecdotes were presented,
one from someone offering to buy, and one from an Ebay seller
who purportedly had a /24 to sell. I have seen about half a dozen
incidents over the past 12 to 13 years, where people were offering
to buy IP address blocks. In most of these cases, I and others,
were able to educate the person that it was not necessary to buy
addresses, simply work through the bureaucratic processes with 
ARIN and get them free. The key piece of advice that I gave people
was to never take "no" for an answer from ARIN. If you actually
have a legitimate IP network that needs to assign addresses to
devices, then you will get them from ARIN if you only persist in
asking ARIN what additional info they need in order to approve
your request.

So, for starters, I don't believe that inquiries from buyers really
represent any kind of black market, just confused business people
who misunderstand ARIN's role and processes.

The Ebay case is interesting because it is recent. I have heard of
other similar IP address sales, most frequently /24s, going back 
into the late 90s. I've no doubt that some of these, maybe half
a dozen, actually did end up being sold. And maybe there are ten
times as many that never came to light on Ebay. Even 60 transfers
of /24 blocks over a ten year period, is not worth making a policy
change.

Because no-one has been able to demonstrate an actual completed IP
address block sale, I believe that they are very uncommon indeed.
And I strongly suspect that the vast majority of them are in the 
old Class C swamp space which has much larger issues related to
whois records and relationships with legacy holders. If anyone with
a swamp Class C in use today on the Internet, came to ARIN and said,
we paid $500 for this block a few years back, and we want to trade
it in for a fresh legitimate one, as far as I can see, under current
policy, they would immediately be given a new /24.

No need for transfer policies to clean up the whois database.

--Michael Dillon