[arin-ppml] ARIN-prop-165 Eliminate Needs-Based Justificationon8.3 Specified Transfers

[Owen DeLong]

On Feb 17, 2012, at 9:39 AM, Mike Burns wrote:

> Hi John,
> 
> Answers inline.
> 
> 
> 
>> As I noted in the reply to that article, ARIN's ability to maintain
> the registry accordingly to community policy has not been impacted
> by any attempts by parties to the contrary; if there's a disconnect,
> it is not in the manner in which ARIN is operating.
> 
> 
> The disconnect is ARIN's policy of not updating Whois unless a transferee of legacy space, under no contract with ARIN, voluntarily decides to jump through ARIN's hoops.
> Thus the danger that an actual legal transfer of address rights is effected, but ARIN's Whois still has old and irrelevant data in it.
> 

This answer presumes that your answer to the next question is actually correct. IMHO it suffers from another fundamentally flawed assumption.

> 
>> as an aside, one might consider instead what precisely is being conveyed if it supposed to
> be a number block which is unique with respect to others in the registry, but
> actually isn't complying with the rules of the registry needed to keep it unique?
> 
> I have considered this question, my answer is that what is being conveyed are the exclusive address rights granted to the original registrant and then transferred with a legal chain of custody to the ultimate holder of the address rights.
> 

What exclusive address rights granted to the original registrant by whom and under what legal framework?

IMHO, the internet operates because operators agree to route addresses according to data contained in the agreed upon registries. Even the registries clearly state that registration is not necessarily routability. This is because operators are free to configure their routers in any way they wish. The only enforcement of address rights so far has come in the form of operators refusing to accept routes they don't consider legitimate. It is hard to imagine a situation where the court would order the entire internet to route a particular prefix in a particular way (or even enjoin the entire internet from routing a prefix in a particular way) with any degree of actual efficacy.

This whole talk about address rights strikes me as greatly resembling a debate among flees over which one owns the dog.

Registration guarantees uniqueness among the cooperating registries and so far, ISPs generally regard the uniqueness in the registry databases as a useful and valid way to determine eligibility to control the routing of a particular prefix. If that breaks down, the results are very undefined.

The courts can order the registries to make database updates (though so far, to my knowledge, they have not done so in a manner inconsistent with community developed policies). They can even order a particular ISP to route or not route a prefix in a certain way. They might even be able to convey that order to a number of ISPs. Affecting every ISP, worldwide? Unlikely. Affecting the whole internet? Virtually impossible. More likely, the court would be viewed outside of its jurisdiction as damage and routed around.

So, an organization that is the recipient of a transfer of addresses outside of the policies of the registry has received only a promise that the organization that previously was using the addresses won't use them any more and very little (if anything) else in terms of actual rights.

Owen