[arin-ppml] Implementation of NRPM 8.3

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 4/22/2011 12:14 PM, Brett Frankenberger wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 01:49:42AM +0000, John Curran wrote:
>>
>>> 2) ARIN will accept any form of RSA with the buyer, including the
>>> standard LRSA or a negotiated LRSA, and the actual agreement
>>> language will be kept private without disclosure to the ARIN
>>> membership or community.
>>
>> Not quite. The resources transferred must come under a registration
>> services agreement; this will usually be a standard RSA, unless
>> otherwise required by nature of the transfer.  If legacy resources
>> are involved, the result could be an LRSA, just as can occur during
>> the assignment of an LRSA during an 8.2 M&A transfer.
>
> NRPM 8.3: In addition to transfers under section 8.2, IPv4 number
> resources within the ARIN region may be released to ARIN by the
> authorized resource holder, in whole or in part, for transfer to
> another specified organizational recipient. Such transferred number
> resources may only be received under RSA by organizations that are
> within the ARIN region and can demonstrate the need for such
> resources, as a single aggregate, in the exact amount which they can
> justify under current ARIN policies
>
> The text of the policies says the resources may only be received
> "under RSA".  Are you saying that ARIN's interpretation of that is
> that "RSA" does not mean *the RSA* (i.e. the one any organization
> receiving non-legacy resources is required to sign as a precondition
> of obtaining such resources), but, rather, refers generically to any
> registration services agreement (including the LRSA in the case of
> legacy resources that are elibible to be placed under LRSA)?
>

Brett,

   Let me interject one thing here.  Both the LRSA and the RSA
are contracts and contracts are only as good as the willingness
of the government they are executed in to uphold them.

   In the United States there are an untold number of things
that can get a contract invalidated by the courts, everything
from inserting clauses into it that are illegal, (even if the
signatory is not aware they are illegal at the time of signing)
to duress signing, ie: the contract can be legally valid but
still unenforceable because you blackmailed the guy into signing
it.

   ARIN has shown a long, long history of bending over backwards
to avoid confrontation with any courts - unlike for example the
Free Software Foundation which has been very aggressive about
going to court over the GPL.

    Whichever your viewpoint of right, is, the problem all this boils 
down to is that the RIR system did not choose to work through the
United Nations and the world's governments to have countries pass
laws to enforce aspects of Internet governance, the way that
the telephone companies did back when the phone network was being
extended a hundred years ago.  This leaves ARIN and the RIR's
with an Achilles heel - which is that their ability to enforce
policy is dependent on the mechanisms that the various countries
governments have provided for commercial transactions.  Those
governments are susceptible to political pressure by moneyed
interests, so when a Mickeysoft or other big-buck player
decides that something ARIN is doing is something they don't
like, they can bring pressure to bear on the politicians, who
then can interfere with the very mechanism that ARIN has to
enforce policy.  ARIN knows this so they have to attempt to manipulate
the situation to keep those big-buck players from influencing
the government - otherwise they jeopardize the only lever they
have over the rest of the address holders.

> The basis for my hypothetical is that I think some people here are
> having trouble believing that Microsoft justified 600K addresses.
> And also wondering why, if they could jsutify that many addresses,
> they didn't just get them from ARIN, which would, if the request
> were justified under NRPM policies, make an end-user assignment of
> that size for a lot less money than what Microsoft paid for Nortel's
> addresses.

Because the answer is simply that they CAN'T justify that many.

If MS needed that many addresses for it's MSN/Windows Live ISP
then for what they paid for that block from Nortel they could have 
rented IPv4 addresses from ARIN for 400 years.

So there is clearly something else going on and the only logical
answer is that MS is either speculating and planning on selling
the addresses later, or they decided to get a large block that they
could use to satisfy their own IPv4 requests for the next decade,
or some other long period of time that would not be allowable under
justification.

Whichever way you slice it, it is obvious that Microsoft isn't
going to be on the forefront of transitioning to IPv6 - not now,
not when they have enough addresses to last that long.

Ted