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

[John Santos]

Mike Burns wrote:

IMO, yes, there should be a stringent justification for need for free pool
addresses, and no need justification for transfers, as long as we prevent
gaming the system through simple expedients like preventing transfers of
addresses from those who have tapped the free pool less than a year ago, and
limiting needs-free transfers to less than a /12 per year.

Itbs the insistence on maintaining control of addresses already allocated
from the free pool which is the cause of all this consternation over the
inter-regional transfers.

Once addresses have a monetary value, there is no need for stewards to 
maintain
a needs test, since the market will naturally provide efficient use of
transferred addresses.

Once again, Prop-151 would moot this discussion.

Regards,

Mike Burns

-----------------------

I think the essential difference is that the market defines "need" as 
"something someone is willing to spend money on", while ARIN defines "need"
in terms of technical requirements.  Conflating the two definitions of
need and treating them as equivalent doesn't help matters at all.

In market terms, "need" includes "I need to buy a yacht, and successfully
speculating in IPv4 addresses will allow me to do that."  

This is definitely not a justification that would work to prove "need"
to ARIN for a free pool allocation.

Also, a market (even a restricted market) defines "relative need" as
"who is willing to pay the most for a limited resource."  This could
potentially shut out "poor" organizations that have limited monetary
resources, such as educational institutions, non-profits, and third-world 
countries.

Since the Internet depends to some extent on such organizations for
new development (such as open source software, game-changing experiments,
and so on), we would be shooting ourselves in the foot to limit this.)
On the other hand, 1) I hope at this point most such developments are
using or trending to IPv6, and so don't care much about IPv4 policy,
and 2) I'm pretty sure that the cost of IP transport is much greater 
than the cost of IP address space, so even if the cost goes way up in
a market, this would be a minor effect.

-- 
John Santos
Evans Griffiths & Hart, Inc.
781-861-0670 ext 539