[arin-ppml] ARIN-prop-133: No Volunteer Services on Behalf of Unaffiliated Address Blocks

[Owen DeLong]

On Feb 15, 2011, at 6:45 AM, David Farmer wrote:

> On 2/15/11 02:24 CST, Benson Schliesser wrote:
>> 
>> On Feb 14, 2011, at 11:59 PM, Dale W. Carder wrote:
>> 
>>> Also opposed.  This proposal does not appear to encourage the
>>> proper stewardship of this dataset.
>> 
>> 
>> So, do you believe the current approach is proper stewardship?
> 
> I believe there were definitely issues with the old approach, which I will summarize as "you leave us alone and we'll leave you alone." Note, that was a two way street, I believe it was critically important for the Legacy Holders to leave ARIN more or less alone to form itself, and do the job it has done for more than 10 years and to create the next phase of the Internet.  Dealing with the "Legacy Issue" to early in ARIN's history may have not been a good thing for ARIN.  There was a lot of contention over the Legacy resources at the creation of ARIN and the old approach was a practical solution that allowed the Internet to move forward and become what it is today.
> 
> But I say "old approach" because, there has been a number of significant changes made over the past 3 years to modify that old approach;
> 
> 1. The creation and evolution of the Legacy RSA, this took a year to 18 months to evolve more or less into what we have now.
> 
> 2. Policy 2007-17: Legacy Outreach and Partial Reclamation
> 
> 3.. The creation of the transfer policy, as a response to IPv4 exhaustion,
> 
> 4. Policy 2008-7: Identify Invalid WHOIS POC’s
> 
> 5. And now Draft Policy 2011-2 Protecting Number Resources, which should reclaim abandoned resources now that we have made a first cut at identifying with 2008-7.
> 
> Did the ARIN community wait to long to start dealing with the "Legacy Issue"? Probably.  Is it taking to long? Probably.  But, Legacy resources holders are not to blame for that, the entire ARIN community is.
> 
Even with those changes, I'm not convinced that the current approach (which I will term "can't we all
just get along" rather than "you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone") needs changing.

In all reality, the "legacy issue" is really akin to much ado about nothing. First, even if we were
to hold legacy users to current policy standards for utilization and reclaim every last drop of
IPv4 possible, the process would take longer than IPv4 will probably matter in order to complete
and there isn't that much space to be reclaimed compared to current consumption rates. A few
months at best. A multi-year effort simply isn't sensible.

Second, there are no legacy IPv6 registrations, so, with the transition of IPv4 from active global
protocol to islands of antiquated usage, the whole thing becomes moot. That transition will
probably happen faster than any major reclamation effort could complete.

The highest $/address in the ARIN fee structure works out to roughly $1.22 per registered address.
The largest annual fee paid by end-users is less than $0.50 per registered address.

Trying to inflict fees onto legacy holders through any involuntary process will easily cost more in
legal fees than ARIN has any hope of ever actually collecting from them.

Given all of these facts, I'm all for cleaning up the data with effective gentle pruning, but, an all
out assault on legacy holders or the fracturing of the registry system is neither good stewardship,
nor a good use of time and resources.

In short, while this proposal may appear to be a rearranging of the deck chairs at best, in truth,
it is more like sabotaging the life boats.

Owen