[ppml] NANOG IPv4 Exhaustion BoF

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> I personally am confident that ARIN Counsel will be able to 
> speak to this issue.  If the individual lawyers we've been 
> dealing with so far (Steve and Ben) don't deal with that area 
> of law, I know they have the resources to engage someone who does.

I doubt that they have the resources to engage someone else. My
understanding
is that lawyers do not work for free, they charge their clients
more-or-less
on a time and materials basis. Therefore, if the client (ARIN BoT and
President)
do not ask ARIN's counsel to look into the possibility that these
transfer
plans are stepping into the area regulated by the SEC, then they won't 
engage someone to look into that.

So far, from the discussion that I have seen, it does not appear that
anyone seriously considered the possibility that the IP address
market proposals are getting rather close to the territory that the
SEC regulates. That's why I'm raising the issue here, in hopes that
some of the people on this list will discuss it with the BoT,
and with some sort of legal advisor who has expertise in the right
area of law. It could be the current counsel or some other lawyer.
That is up to the BoT.

> > Companies will build out IPv6 networks and eventually begin 
> retiring 
> > their IPv4 addresses. And as far as the "have nots"
> > are concerned, there is no law preventing them from simply 
> carving up 
> > 126/8, a large block that was given to a Japanese cable company. Or 
> > any other large block that seems relatively unused on the North 
> > American Internet.
> 
> There is no law preventing them from utilizing addresses 
> uniquely registered to another party, but there is pretty 
> strong policy in place that will prevent them from being able 
> to announce a route covering those addresses into the DFZ.  

And just what policy is that? We regularly see incidents where
organizations announce addresses into the DMZ that are not registered
to the organization. If you talk to the operational folks you will
learn that it is not a simple matter to figure out whether a 
particular route announcement is proper or not.

> That basically makes such addresses equivalent to RFC 1918 
> space.

Tell that to the people who couldn't get to YouTube a week ago.
Now imagine what would have happened if Pakistani Telecom made
a typo and accidentally announced address space used by a
German ISP for their modem dial customers. Instead of knocking
out a high traffic site due to blocking their nameservers, 
it would cause intermittent outages to a few customers, many of 
whom would redial and solve the problem.

The fact is that there are big impact address blocks and small
impact address blocks. Not all are equal in their importance to
North American ISPs.

--Michael Dillon