[arin-ppml] Q2: on Address Transfers - Overkill on the freezeperiod?

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert E. Seastrom [mailto:rs at seastrom.com] On Behalf Of Robert
E.
> Complete disagreement here.  Restrictions on the transferor and
> transferee are different sides of the same coin, but restrictions on
> the transferor are closer to the source and more likely to catch
> people's attention.

Closer to the source of what? I quite literally have no idea what you
mean.
>From what I've seen of your argument, you still aren't refuting my
contention that you can catch speculation more effectively by
restricting post-transfer sales than by slapping categorical
restrictions on people who can transfer. 
 
> > As Scott noted, the only thing you want to do with the source is
make
> > sure that they don't sell their assignment and then come back to
ARIN
> > for more for free.
> 
> Or go back into the market, driving up the prices needlessly.

This comment makes no sense to me, and seems to be unrelated to the
point about someone selling addresses and then restocking from the free
pool. 

What do you mean by "go back into the market, driving up prices?" If
more supply goes into the market, prices tend to go down. If onselling
by transfer recipients is restricted for two years, they don't go back
into the market, for two years. 

> I have a huge amount of faith in ARIN's analysts and believe that they
> do an exceptionally good job today of making sure that requests that
> are blatantly fabricated don't slip through.  I do not make the error
> (as you seem to have) of assuming that everything is black and white,

Huh? It is the advocates of centralized needs assessment that believe
everything is black and white. I believe that nothing in economics is
black and white; everything is a trade off and a question of relative
cost compared to close substitutes. You on the other hand seem to think
that there is some fixed, divinely ordained relationship between an
organization's network and the amount of addresses it needs. 

Black and white folks could say that _no one_ "needs" IPv4 addresses any
more, because they could implement NATs or switch to IPv6. An economic
perspective says, it all depends on what you have to pay to implement
those various options. And since my consumption of more v4 addresses
stops you from consuming them, there ought to be a price system to use
to value those options. 

> Creating a climate in which the incentive to fib on one's applications
> is increased rather than decreased, is a step away from goodness.  I'm
> not for it.

That climate is HERE, my friend. It is caused by the increasing scarcity
of v4 addresses. It will continue regardless of the fate of transfer
policies. That was my point. 

However, you and Scott did give me an idea. If you do want to impose
restrictions on transferors, then simply require that they cannot
transfer _any addresses they received from ARIN_ in the past year/2
years.