[arin-ppml] Microsoft receives court approval for transfer as agreed with ARIN

[John Curran]

On Apr 28, 2011, at 12:34 PM, David Conrad wrote:
> 
> I would be quite surprised if legacy holders viewed themselves as being "within the ARIN framework" to begin with. My impression is that some ARIN meeting-goers and ppml mailing list participants are asserting legacy holders have no rights but what ARIN grants them. I'm guessing that most of the legacy holders who have even considered the issue (which would be the tiny minority) believe something different, e.g., that they own (in the property sense) the address space they received ages ago.

Quite possibly...  there is no apparent motivation for them to feel 
otherwise.  The fact that others (such as network operators) have 
certain rights to the registry entries (e.g. visibility) is likely
lost on many.

> The two court rulings to date (Kremens and the NNI bankruptcy) would seem to uphold the legacy holders' point of view.

<chuckle>  A very interesting perspective, but incorrect. ARIN has only
changed registrations according to the community developed policy, and
parties seeking otherwise have not prevailed in goals to the contrary.

> From this perspective, agreeing to the ARIN worldview (even to the point of participating in this sort of discussion) means risking rights the legacy holders believe they have for essentially no benefit at a time when their assets have obviously increasing value.  The fact that said ownership rights are questionable (at least from the perspective of ARIN meeting-goers and ppml mailing list participants) is largely irrelevant until there is a definitive court ruling enforcing the ARIN view.  Until then, if ARIN tries to assert their view, I'd imagine the legacy holders will simply say "screw you" and go to places like depository.net/tradeipv4.com/etc.

Actually, it's really not the "ARIN" view that there are policies that govern 
Internet address space; it's the actual governance model that the collective 
Internet community has set up for management of these identifiers.  We believe 
that the number resources should be managed by a multi-stakeholder, private 
sector led, bottom-up policy development model of technical coordination that 
acts for the benefit of global Internet users.  There are multiple statements
to this effect in the establishment of Internet name and number management 
institutions.

Now, there may be some folks who believe that policies that result from such 
a management model limits their options when monetizing their resources, but 
that is no different than an organization that doesn't like the present 
policies regarding the DNS system.  Their recourse is to participate in 
the policy development process and change the policies to meet their needs.  
ARIN doesn't get a choice in whether we implement the community developed 
polices, and at the end of the day, the registry records in our database 
get updated accordingly.

FYI,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN