[arin-ppml] Microsoft receives court approval for transfer as agreed with ARIN

[Michael Dillon]

> So, um help me out here.  I just want to make sure I understand this.
>
> So with respect to all the space being transfered, Microsoft will demonstrate
> need and ARIN will review need?

> How exactly does one go about demonstrating an immediate need for 10 /16s?

Do you realise how dumb this question is?

Some of us think before we speak, and even do a bit of research. You
don't have to be
a rocket scientist to know that Microsoft is a very big company
operating in virtually
every country on the planet, that they dominate their market niche,
and that their
customer base tends to be multinational companies, very large companies and
other big companies. They may not be a telecomms company on the face of it,
but they do supply many of the same services as ISPs. For instance MSN is
still an important supplier of dialup Internet access, which in turn,
is an important
class of service in the USA where broadband deployment is restricted
to the largest
cities and even there may not cover 100% of neighborhoods.

In addition, Microsoft operates a number of very large data centers to support
various services that they offer such as Windows Live, and now they are
busy expanding those data centers to offer cloud computing services under
the brand Windows Azure. Their customer base is very important in this
analysis because when you have lots of very large customers, it doesn't
take a whole lot of signed contracts before you have to deliver new network
services on a scale that dwarfs all but the top 10 or 20 telecoms companies.

I worked for a global telecomms company and regularly picked up /15
blocks from ARIN, so I am not at all surprised that the company pushing
hosted Sharepoint, hosted Office 2010 and Windows Azure, was able to
come up with a real technical justification for only 5 times what I used to get.

They say that you should pick your battles, and I think you are all wasting
your time nitpicking any IP address exchanges where the recipient clearly
is in the ISP business.

--Michael Dillon