[arin-ppml] ARIN-PPML Digest, Vol 70, Issue 141

[Mike Burns]

John,


I read the bankruptcy documents and I read the NRPM and I have to insist that ARIN did not follow policy on this issue, as I am using that fact to buttress my argument that only when ARIN's policies conform to legal realities can we avoid the potential for corruption which must be avoided if ARIN is to maintain its trust position. 

Everything hinges on the phrase in the bankruptcy docs which says these addresses were allocated to Nortel's "predecessors in interest."
I read that and I looked up "predecessors in interest" and I saw that legally it means that prior owners or those with a prior interest in assets. The bankruptcy docs also say these came in the 1990s, and we know they are legacy and thus came between 1990 and 1997 at the latest.

So I typed "Nortel acquisitions" into google and the first hit was a nice chart on the Nortel page showing the list of their acquisitions by date. It was not a long list, and some of the names were familiar to me as a guy with 30 years of experience.  

The names include Bay Networks, which a glance at their wikipedia page indicated was formed from two prior companies I had also heard of who were active in the 1990-97 time period.

A simple search of whois for these entities would reveal whether they ever had an allocation or not, but my supposition is that these are the "predecessors in interest" whose IP addresses Nortel had the exclusive right to transfer.

Because this was a random aggregation of allocations to ancient entities decades ago, it is simply asking too much for me to believe that this aggregate amount was precisely the correct justification for the sole entity who won the auction. Of all the companies in the world who could have purchased these addresses, we are to believe that the one who did was also the one who had a justified need that matched allocations to random entities years and years ago.  And that Microsoft, who presumably knew their own need, decided to pay millions for what they could have received from ARIN directly for free.

In addition, 8.3 requires the transfer of the justified amount in a single aggregate, and if these are addresses from Nortel's predecessors in Interest, how can they be a single aggregate?

If they are not a single aggregate, how does the transfer conform to 8.3, even if we allow for the fiction of justification?

And if the deal was per policy, as you say, can we make the assumption that it is entirely within ARIN policy for legacy IP addresses to transfer as a result of mergers and acquistions without any notice to ARIN?

Even if you don't wish to use the word ownership, and instead use the words "rights to transfer", would it be correct to say that legacy addresses can be transferred from entity to entity without notice to ARIN?

So what was the ARIN policy which allowed the "rights to transfer" addresses from one company to another company without ARIN involvement, which manifestly occurred here?

I hope you can come off that attestation of adherence to policy. If we don't address the problems inherent in the needs justification requirement, trust in ARIN suffers.

We are the ARIN community. We shouldn't allow the ARIN trust level to be eroded by maintaining justification policies that require "creativity" in application, that foster mistrust in whois, and that provide a disincentive to sign an LRSA.

We do not require any punting to a global level. APNIC did it and we can do it to.

Remove justifications for all transfers.

Regards,

Mike


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: John Curran 
  To: Mike Burns ; Mike Burns 
  Cc: Rudolph Daniel ; arin-ppml at arin.net List 
  Sent: Friday, April 29, 2011 10:02 AM
  Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] ARIN-PPML Digest, Vol 70, Issue 141


  On Apr 29, 2011, at 9:40 AM, Mike Burns wrote:


    Hi Rudolph,

    The difference in outcome in the Microsoft case is that we would not have had to process the transfer outside of established ARIN protocols, and we would have saved some of what I believe to be ARIN's largest asset as we move forward into the ip trading world. That asset is ARIN's position as a trust authority. ARIN must maintain the viability of whois as a trusted source for network operators who are asked to broadcast addresses as well as a trusted source for those seeking verification of ownership/control as part of a transfer transaction. I believe that if ARIN continues in its role as a title agency, that is, vetting the chain-of-custody of address transfers, that its whois will be the most likely candidate to fill the void that the market will create for a central trust authority.

    ARIN will maintain order and the market will steward the resources to their most efficient use.

    If ARIN reduces credibility through further out-of-policy transfers, and it's justification policies impede the flow of accurate information to whois, we all lose.


  Mike - 

      ARIN only processes transfer requests in accordance 
      with the established number resource policy.


  Thanks,
  /John


  John Curran
  President and CEO
  ARIN

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