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

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 05:47:35PM +0000, Paul Vixie wrote:
> so, would it be better in your opinion that there not be such a market,
> which presumably would not occur without an ARIN transfer policy, since
> sellers would be in violation of their RSA's?  or is the fact that most
> space in the world is legacy mean that such a market will come into
> existence (perhaps, created and operated by speculators?) no matter what
> ARIN does with 2008-2?

Leaving aside the legacy space issue; I believe we would be better
without a liberalize transfer policy.

The reason is that technology transitions happen best when they are
shared pain.  For for example to Y2K.  One, very specific date.
Same (basic problem) for everyone who runs a computer.  Because of
these properties the troops were rallied, work was done, and it was
almost entirely a non-issue.

If there were a way to have all ISP's "run out" on the same date,
and be able to predict that date with reasonable accuracy I'd be
all for it.  That to me would insure a fairly smooth transition to
IPv6.

A market is one mechanism to lengthen the amount of time over which
the transition occurs.  This will create increased costs for first
movers (as development costs typically get spread to first movers),
create competitive advantages and disadvantages in the market place,
increase costs as customers with slow to move ISP's may need to
move to fast to move ISP's if they themselves have a need and
generally make the entire transition much worse.

On the legacy space issue, that's a gigantic mistake that will go
down in the history books.  Better records should have been kept.
Clear contracts should have been in place from day one; ARIN, IANA,
ICANN, and the US government should have worked to solve this when
ARIN was founded.  We have close to three decades of head in the
sand thinking when it comes to legacy space leading to all sorts
of bit-rot and other problems.   My only hope is that we move to
IPv6 before it becomes a major issue; because the other path is to
end up in court, and as any laywer will tell you there's always a
chance that a judge or jury will make some totally random decision
for no good reason, leaving you in an even bigger mess.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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