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

[William Herrin]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 3:12 PM, Edward Lewis <Ed.Lewis at neustar.biz> wrote:
> Thinking that legacy holders are completely free to do as they wish is
> false.  For example, I (can only) believe they had to submit to being in
> WhoIs from the start.  The conditions under which Postel assigned resources
> are just not well documented, the "strings attached" are unknown.  It could
> be that all of the resources are reclaimable under some obscure
> interpretation of GFE (government furnished equipment) rules.  This was
> mentioned by ARIN's legal council at a meeting a few years ago.

Some counter-arguments include:

Laches - by failing to require legacy registrants to enter into a
contract (or even make contact) for a decade and a half, ARIN has
legally conceded that those registrants' control of their number
resources are not governed by ARIN.

Tortious interference - canceling an IP address registration is likely
to interfere with the registrant's contract with his ISP to connect
him to the global Internet including the RDNS that helps specific
applications go. Absent clear legal standing for such a change in
behavior, ARIN could be liable for direct and indirect monetary
damages which occur as a result.

There's a murky line here between "failing to proactively provide
registration services" that ARIN probably isn't compelled to do and
obstructing maintenance of the registration which probably gets ARIN
into trouble. If ARIN is asked to explore it in detail (litigiously),
they will win some and lose some. The fight alone could consume the
annual budget even before paying out on the "some" that they lose.
IMHO, better to ask ARIN to retreat a safe distance from that line.
Which is basically where things stand now without this proposal and,
in part, why I'm opposed to the proposal.


If anyone's interested, here are the forms from over the years (the
ones I could find) that specified (or failed to) the obligations and
expectations placed on the legacy registrants:

http://bill.herrin.us/network/templates/


Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004