[arin-ppml] "Leasing" of space via non-connectivity providers

[Scott Helms]

> Address leasing without ARIN in the loop holds the prospect of
> demolishing those principles, far more so than paid address transfers
> with the recipient explicitly evaluated by ARIN. At least with the
> transfers the "legal fiction" is relatively close to the reality: that
> you're paying someone the one time cost of altering his network to
> consume fewer addresses. What fiction for leasing meets those two
> principles?
So what do you think of what we do today, and have for over 5 years, 
which is reassign or reallocate space to ISPs we are not providing a 
connection to in order for smaller providers to gain access to portable 
address space?  We started doing this to help ISPs that don't qualify in 
some way (hard to be multi-homed in areas without more than one 
provider) or don't want to deal with ARIN.  You could say we are a 
corner case and most of the customers that leverage this service from us 
are smaller (often in rural) retail ISPs, which ARIN seems to be 
recognizing have different needs from their larger brethren.  I'd also 
point out that we push the same requirements down to those ISPs that 
ARIN places on us and frankly our ability to accurately assess 
utilization is _much_ better than ARIN's because in most of these cases 
we're also helping take care of the network infrastructure.  That was 
the other reason we started leasing space, we were spending too much 
time renumbering networks for ISPs that were desperate to obtain lower 
cost Internet connectivity.


>
> A potential is not a reality. Scott's right about wait-and-see. BUT,
> from the ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure corner, it might be
> helpful for ARIN to signal early that address leasing in the absence
> of a healthy transfer market would be treated as a public policy
> problem to be solved to the detriment of the lessors. If it does no
> more than cause the leasing companies to set a buy price for every
> assignment, we'll have avoided the worst of the danger.
Frankly I wouldn't care if this happened since we only charge a little 
above what ARIN charges directly to cover our record keeping costs, but 
I have no idea how any of the RIRs could possibly enforce it.  One thing 
I could see happening is ARIN (and the other RIRs) could offer 
information about what space ought to cost, i.e. break down what it 
costs a direct registrant per /24 etc.  Also, a listing of providers 
that have space and don't gouge for it might be workable, though again 
verification could be an issue.



-- 
Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
--------------------------------
http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
--------------------------------