[arin-ppml] Q1 - ARIN address transfer policy: why the trigger date?

[Milton L Mueller]

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From: Ted Mittelstaedt [mailto:tedm at ipinc.net]

This is the kind of response I had hoped I wouldn't get. I know there are ideologically motivated people who think it is evil to trade addresses, or "immoral" to hold on to more than you actally "need" (as if "address need" were some stable, fixed and objectively verifiable attribute of any network). But if that is your position, then there should be no transfer policy at all, right? So while it is evident that that attitude has shaped the nature of ARIN's policy, it is not really relevant to defining a transfer policy once you decide to have one.

>ARIN policy isn't supposed to be based on an economic rationale.

Um. Policies pertaining to scarce resources used by global industries that aren't grounded in sound economic concepts about actual behavior under conditions of scarcity cannot succeed. The greatest good for the greatest number cannot be achieved without taking actors' economic incentives into account. See below.

>By definition, if you have "too much" address space then you
>are required under the RSA you signed to return it.  Why - because [snip]
>Therefore your hypothetical situation -cannot- exist pre-IPv4 runout.

Your statement describes an idealized interpretation of what you consider to be a moral obligation. It does not describe how people actually behave. Thus, your statement that the situatuion "cannot" exist is factually incorrect. The situation does exist, and everyone knows it does. Further, the situation exists both before and after IANA's free pool exhaustion.

>The modification of the ARIN requirements to permit "selling"
>effectively modifies the existing RSAs that people have signed,
>because it basically says that "After IPv4-runout we don't give a crap
>how you got your IPv4, whether honestly or not, from this point on we all
>have a clean slate" This is why such a policy is a horrible idea pre-IPv4 runout.

OK, I am glad that you finally got around to attempting to answer my question. And your anwer is, presumably, that the "clean slate" facilitates the transfer of resources from people who value them less to people who value them more. And my simple observation is that if it makes sense to do that after IANA pool depletion, it makes sense to do it beforehand. 

 

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