[arin-ppml] 2011-1 dissent Was: Re: ARIN-2011-1: ARIN Inter-RIR Transfers - Last Call

[David Farmer]

On 10/21/11 03:50 CDT, William Herrin wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Owen DeLong<owen at delong.com>  wrote:
>> I believe that a substantially less restrictive policy would be incompatible.
>
> Unfortunately, John Curran has just posted that's not the case. Under
> the current text, another RIR's policy whose basis for needs
> justification is substantially less restrictive than ARIN's would
> still control for addresses transferred out of the region. 2011-1, as
> presently written, may cause substantially more restrictive
> justification policies to be applied to ARIN transferees receiving
> ARIN addresses than to out-region transferees receiving ARIN
> addresses.
>
> I find that fundamentally unfair and have a big problem with it.

First, I'm not unsympathetic to the fairness argument, and on the 
surface applying both RIR's transfer policies seems like a fair way to 
solve this problem.  However, once you scratch the surface and start 
looking at how such a policy will work from a practical point of view 
things get ugly very fast and it no longer looks as fair as it did on 
the surface.

ARIN will not have any independent history to base its analysis of need 
on and will be dependent on the records of the other RIR anyway.  The 
organization from the other RIR's region will not necessarily be 
familiar with ARIN's policy and processes.  It doubles the work for the 
organizations involved in the transfer.  There will frequently be 
language and cultural issues that get in the way of a fair and complete 
analysis, there are a more practical issues like business hours, etc... 
that will interfere with easy flow of information.  These are the exact 
reasons that the RIR system was crated in the first place.  Forcing both 
policies to be applied ignores more than a decade of experience in good 
Internet number resource management.  How is that fair?

Beyond that, we really need to be careful when we start throwing around 
the word "FAIR", it cuts both ways.  With the legacy resources in our 
region we have approximately half of all IPv4 resources.  On the 
surface, there are NOT many ways that seems fair, its not fair by 
population, its not even fair by land mass.  But if you dig down there 
are valid reasons why.

So, on the surface it may seem fair to apply both policies, but we have 
to dig deeper, and when you do, applying both policies really isn't 
practical, probably will not really result in more fairness in the 
system as a whole, and it is possible that it would be less fair.

By the way, thank you for holding our feet to the fire, by actually 
asking questions, it is far more important to the system than actually 
writing the text, not that that's easy either.

-- 
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David Farmer               Email:farmer at umn.edu
Networking & Telecommunication Services
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