[arin-ppml] ARIN releases new version of the Legacy Registration

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Sun, 7 Sep 2008 03:41:02 -0400, John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org> wrote:

>On Sep 7, 2008, at 2:54 AM, Jeremy H. Griffith wrote:
>>
>> I'm going by my best recollection of the rules in effect
>> at the time I received my assignment, in 1992.  If you
>> feel you have better information, kindly share it.
>
>Already done; see prior email regarding IANA's policy on
>reclamation in absence of need, and my August 23 posting
>regarding ARIN's history and the decision of the USG to
>move to an industry-led and industry-funded model for IP
>registry services.  To my knowledge, those are the rules
>that cover any IP assignment regardless of date of issue.

Yes, I read your August 23 post at the time with great interest.
I also read Bill Herrin's reply, which in part said:

>On Sat, 23 Aug 2008 10:40:20 -0400, "William Herrin" <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
>
>>Quite the contrary: the way the legacy registrations were described
>>when made, they were intended to be unique and persist indefinitely,
>>even if the network was never connected to the Internet at large. The
>>sole described mechanism by which addresses could revert to the
>>registry was voluntary return.
>>
>>What's more, the presentations made to gain the community consensus
>>that led to NCR-9218742's amendment 6 repeatedly promised that what
>>came to be known as the legacy registrations would remain untouched by
>>ARIN except to provide whois and rdns services.
>>http://rip.psg.com/~randy/970414.fncac.pdf is was such a presentation,
>>made to the FNC in support of ARIN's formation. See page 9,
>>specifically: "Current and old allocations and their DNS will be
>>maintained with no policy changes"

Your response to the last para was:

>You're right!  That presentation was made after adoption of RFC 2050,
>which specifically calls for invalidation of existing assignments which
>are no longer needed.

In your other post today, you explained the RFC 2050 reference:

>Just to be clear, there was such a statement made in 1996 by Jon Postel
>(via RFC 2050) that reads "The IANA reserves the right to invalidate any
>IP assignments once it is determined the the requirement for the address
>space no longer exists."  As the original IANA, Jon certainly knew what
>conditions were applicable to existing IP assignments, even if those who
>received the assignments did not...

Which brings us to the interesting question, *who* determines
that the "requirement ... no longer exists"?  ARIN, I presume, 
but one could argue the registrant decides, which seemed to be 
Bill's understanding above.

And on what grounds?  Could this clause be used, for example, 
to invalidate any assignment where usage was not 100%?  50%?  
One address?  Whatever ARIN current policy is?  But wait, it
says "no policy changes" in NCR-9218742's amendment 6.  So
does this mean ARIN can never change its policies?  Ouch.

I think you were right on August 23:

>Frankly, I'd rather not think about this, and hope that this
>particular chain of succession remain nothing more than an
>interesting historical tidbit best ignored.
>  ...
>In the end, we have to treat all parties with respect, whether
>they are holding a legacy allocation or one more recent.

Thank you for that.


--JHG <jhg at omsys.com>