[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal 108: Eliminate the term license in the NRPM

[Milton L Mueller]

Sorry to respond slowly to this, Lee, have been on the road. Honestly, to me the issue is not at all about insisting that addresses are "inherently property"; it is about the attitudes and policies that inform the ARIN contracts.
I think the key policy conflicts have to do with transferability, which I continue to believe is very important in the ipv4 context. The terms and conditions under which RIRs can reclaim addresses, and the tying of address resources to routing and aggregation constraints is another long term area of concern.

I continue to see liberalized transferability as a key to dealing with the address shortages that will probably occur in the short term as the hoped-for migration to ipv6 drags on. Ithink the ARIN policy toward that is too restrictive, and will not be used. I believe that a more reasonable, less trading-hostile attitude toward address markets would free up a lot of resources for use and rationalize the address scarcity problem by properly pricing addresses. this would also create another incentive to adopt ipv6.

You were probably hoping for something more specific; e.g., alter section x.y.(z) of the NPRM; however, the debate over PP 108 has revealed a continuing, higher-level attitudinal and philosophical disagreement in the community that makes debates over specifics become proxies for these larger disagreements. As the proponents of 108 have correctly noted, the idea that assignees have no transferable property rights is deeply embedded on documents and policies that go way back. Lacking the resources and time to review and revise the whole shebang, I have to limit my role to urging and supporting some attitudinal changes that might, in the future, lead to more specific alterations in policy.

________________________________
From: Lee Howard [spiffnolee at yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 2:17 PM
To: Milton L Mueller; michael.dillon at bt.com; arin-ppml at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] Policy Proposal 108: Eliminate the term license in the NRPM

Milton Mueller wrote:

> Now we are getting somewhere more reasonable. Yes,
> contracts can be structured to allow the parties more or
> less rights, more or less exclusivity, more or less
> transferability. But that is a choice. So lets have a
> discussion about that. It is obvious that ARIN does not
> allow free transferability of the rights it assigns, but this is
> just a policy decision it makes and that policy could be
> modified in hundreds of ways. You contribute nothing
> useful to that policy debate by making the word "property
> rights" a taboo and attempting to banish it from the discussion.

Can I suggest that this conversation move in that direction?
The back-and-forth of "address cannot be property" vs.
"addresses are inherently property" seems to be deadlocked.
There may be policies that would follow from a definition of
addresses as property; what policies would you propose?

Lee

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