[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal: IPv4 Recovery Fund - Revised

[Wettling, Fred]

Revised

In a message written on Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 09:55:04AM -0500, Wettling,
Fred wrote:
The policy proposal strikes at a fundamental premise of IANA, RIRs,
NIRs, and LIRs. that of IP address ownership.  Organizations that
receive IP address allocations from a recognized registry do not own the
addresses. They are simply granted use of the addresses under the
conditions of the service agreement with their registry.  The current
ARIN Service Agreement (Version 9.2) makes this perfectly clear.

On Tuesday, January 20, 2009 10:15 AM, Leo Bicknell replied
I'm curious about your comment, because it is the opposite of what I
intended with the policy and thus i wonder if the wording is not clear.

Under this proposal a resource holder can't sell (or transfer) addresses
to anyone.  The only thing you can do is the same thing you can do
today, return them to ARIN.  Yes, ARIN may offer you some compensation,
which can either be thought of as payment for your trouble to return
them, or can be thought of payment to terminate the contract, but ARIN
does not buy the addresses.  Offering compensation in these forms does
not make the addresses property, indeed its done between two parties who
already have a contract in place denying all property rights.

ARIN would pay for this activity by new fees on resource recipients,
although rather than a yearly fee it would be a one time fee at the time
of issue.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Leo - 
The policy proposal 4.X.2 (Recovery of IPv4 Space) states ...However,
upon implementation of this policy, ARIN will offer financial incentives
for the return of IPv4 resources to ARIN relinquishment of any future
claims to those resources....

The policy proposal 4.X.5 (Transparency) states... ARIN staff shall make
public the current and historical prices of asks, bids, and executed
transactions in a manor that facilitates the bidding process.  ARIN
staff must regularly report on the amount of address space obtained and
distributed via this mechanism, number of blocks subdivided, as well as
aggregate financial numbers.
 
My comments are within the context of the verb "sell" as defined by
Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries. (1) to give up (property) to
another for something of value (as money), (2) exchange or deliver for
money or its equivalent, (3) give up for a price or reward.  ""Financial
incentives", "bids", and "asks" appear to me to be terms related to
sales.

I believe the common interpretation of the policy, if/when compensation
is offered to the resource holder, will be that of a sale.  CFOs,
Controllers, or others responsible for the financial well-being of their
organization, will book the money received from ARIN as revenue on their
income statements.

I agree that lack of vision and very poor foresight by ISPs and
end-users will cause some level of discomfort as the world shifts to
IPv6.  However, I believe that additional "life support" for IPv4 is
simply extending the inevitable.

Regards - Fred