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

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> 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. 

Another good example of how many members of this community get stuck in ideological ruts.

That was a policy put into place in the mid-1990s to serve a specific purpose, namely route aggregation. The "leasing" model (as opposed to "ownership") was not handed down by God on stone tablets but was seen as the only feasible way at the time to prevent fragmentation of the address space. A new proposed policy should thus be evaluated on the basis of the extent to which it leads to such fragmentation or not. Whatever one's opinion of Leo's proposed policy, there is nothing about ARIN buying back addresses that produces the route deaggregation problems that led to the leading model in the first place. And yet, Fred's comments puts the ideology first and forgets about its orginal function.

And as for your argument that you can't sell what you don't own, remember we are in a leasing model now, and its perfectly possible, legally ethically and contractually, for a lessor to buy back a leased item from a lessee.

> What would stop eBay
> or anyone else from getting into the "IPv4 Fire Sale" business 
> (for a fee, of course)?

The fact that ARIN has a monopoly on the registry and wouldn't allow the address to be registered unless it consented to such a role for third parties: that's what. We should be so lucky as to have an organized process that permitted third parties to get involved. Indeed, I respectfully suggest that you ought to be more concerned about the long term implications of ARIN's monopoly power than about deviations from the ownership religion.

> IPv4 resources will become more scarce
> over time.  Organizations with any financial acumen would not "sell" any
> available IPv4 blocks for years... until the price is driven very high.

Obviously false. V4 addresses MIGHT become more valuable, or they might not. Organizations who held them too long might easily find them worthless