[arin-ppml] Nanog IPV4 Panel Discussion and 8.3 transfers

[Matthew Kaufman]

On 2/7/2012 4:22 AM, John Curran wrote:
> On Feb 6, 2012, at 4:14 PM, Andrew Dul wrote:
>
>> Vendor A sells a /16 to Vendor B.  Vendor B can justify a /20 under
>> current policy.  ARIN's response (channeling John Curran's response to
>> this question) to this transfer would be to update the WHOIS to reflect
>> that Vendor B now has a /20.
> To be very clear, the most likely course of events is as follows:
> Vendor B puts in a transfer request to ARIN for a /16 and it is
> denied because they only need a /20 under current policies.  They
> reapply to transfer specific /20 from vendor A (which concurs) and
> that is approved and the registry is updated to reflect that the
> specific /20 is now held by Vendor B.

No. A more likely course of events is:
Vendor B puts in a transfer request to ARIN for a /16 and it is denied 
because they only need a /20 under current policies. Not wanting to 
waste the time and money they've put in already to locate and purchase a 
/16, they hire a consultant who modifies their request sufficiently such 
that their application for transfer now appears to show a need for the 
full /16. The transfer of the /16 is then approved.

If that fails (which it probably won't), they renegotiate the deal so 
that they actually control the whole /16 but only transfer the /20 for 
now, and transfer the rest later... in the meantime they either 
advertise only the /20 or they just advertise and use the /16 with 
Vendor A's permission. Then anyone investigating what's going on has no 
idea what the actual usage of the "rest" of the /16 is, and thus begins 
the inevitable decline in the data quality of the IPv4 whois service.

Matthew Kaufman