[arin-ppml] ARIN-prop-136 Services Opt-out Allowed for Unaffiliated Address Blocks

[John Curran]

On Feb 25, 2011, at 7:16 AM, Milton L Mueller wrote:

> False assumption #1: opting out of ARIN services means no Whois record. 
> Fact: Some people are so stuck in the mindset that ARIN and only ARIN can offer a Whois service that they are missing the point of this proposal. Are you aware of the request by a prospective competitor for bulk access to Whois so that it can be reconciled with an alternate provider and maintain a globally consistent directory? 

Milton - 

We don't seem to have any actual details regarding how such registries 
might interact with the existing system, what common goals would still 
exist (if any), or even what authority and policies they'd operate under. 
Such details are essential to understanding what exactly is being proposed 
when you reference "alternative providers", and as you are well-aware, 
these are the sort of issues that took years to work out in the DNS 
registry system and (to some extent) even now are still evolving under 
guidance from an entire ecosystem of constituencies within ICANN. 

Perhaps addressing those some of these questions via in an actual proposal 
to change ICP-2 could result in a revised framework for handling global 
number resource management?  That certainly would make evaluating policy 
proposals such as ARIN-prop-136 much more straightforward.

If such a change is desired, the most appropriate first step would be those 
who want it to work on a concrete proposal that addresses the material issues
of introducing a new (non-geographic) competitive registry framework. That 
would allow consideration by the global community of the potential issues 
and benefits from introducing commercial registries, and furthermore could 
be actually discussed in open manner which includes governments, business, 
standards organizations and civil society. 

I presume that you are familiar with this sort of process, and hopefully
can see how the ARIN region considering it independently from the current 
global policy for number resource management would be contrary to actually 
having open and transparent governance for these the global number resources?

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN