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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 2/25/2011 12:09 PM, John Curran wrote:
> On Feb 26, 2011, at 3:53 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
>> Ah.  Let me ask then - if a legacy POC is determined to be
>> illegitimate and marked as such, then what is current ARIN
>> practice - do you attempt to contact any squatter, or do
>> you reclaim and reassign the resource, or do you simply do nothing?
>
> POC validation will get them marked as unresponsive, but we
> are unlikely to determine them invalid unless it is the result
> of a fraud report, and yes, we try to determine whether the
> original resource holder is still out there somewhere.
>
>> But that assumes you can contact them, that the original entity
>> exists.  What if it does not?  Or what if you contact them and
>> they don't know who you are and what your talking about and
>> can't answer your questions?
>
> That happens... Generally, we can find someone who knows
> the relationship and then we work to document it.  If it's a true
> squatter, they usually disappear at our first contact. If we can
> find the original resource holder, we change it to them, and if
> not we reclaim the resource and put it in hold down for reuse.
>

OK then riddle me this:

Let's say you look at the current month's list of unresponsive
POCs and you notice that there's a "legacy" /17 in the list.  It's 
significant enough to investigate so you do.  (/17 is chosen as an 
arbitrary number I do not know what you currently consider large enough 
to pursue, although I know it's not a /24, at least not yet)

You don't see it advertised in the DFZ.  You send a letter to the
original holder at the address and it gets "returned to sender no
longer at this address, no forwarding address left"

You then Google the original holder and discover they are still
around in the original city.  So you call them.  After some digging
you find out that it's a lawyer's office charged with bankruptcy
disposal of the entity.  You explain what your calling about and the
lawyer (smelling some money here) suddenly gets all grabby and tells
you that they "it's theirs and they aren't giving it up but you can
buy it if you want" and threatens to sue you if you take it back.

Or instead of a lawyer you finally get to the IT person and find out
the entity is 1/10th the size it used to be, and they aren't using
this block and never plan to - but once more, the person you talk
to isn't willing to "give it up"

What do you do then?  ARIN staff by now has determined the following:

1) The block is not used even in an unconnected network
2) The original holder is either ignorant of it's use and/or unable to
use it, or is a proxy for the original holder.
3) Your not going to get permission, written or verbal, from anyone to 
take it back, based on them thinking that it might be worth something 
someday
4) The original holder doesn't give a damn what you mark for it in whois 
but is clearly never going to exert the effort to login to ARIN and 
modify the whois record.

The reason I am asking is that I am thinking that perhaps ARIN needs
some more clarity on what constitutes an abandoned legacy resource.

> FYI,
> /John
>
> John Curran
> President and CEO
> ARIN
>
> (about to go offline for 20 hrs)
>
>