[arin-ppml] Fwd: ARIN-prop-165 Eliminate Needs-Based Justification

[Tom Vest]

On Feb 26, 2012, at 3:56 PM, Matthew Petach wrote:

> After mulling over this thread for a few days, I think what I'm coming to
> realize is that my primary concern for maintaining the "needs based"
> rule is that it enforces a dichotomy in the market.
> 
> Newer players must abide strictly by the needs-based assessment of
> the ARIN staff to get addresses.  Their world is strictly defined through
> the eyes of the ARIN staff evaluation, and their vision and growth is
> strictly curtailed by that evaluation.
> 
> Older players, especially legacy players, are not required to follow any
> type of needs-based assessment to hold onto their resources; they
> may squander it at will, or dream big, and roll out an audacious
> undertaking that might never pass the ARIN staff "needs" scrutiny.
> 
> In doing so, we've created an "Old Boys Club", where those who already
> have space essentially *are* the speculators; those with legacy /8s, for
> example, may have no plans for actually making use of the vast majority
> of their space, and thus have no "needs" based justification for it; but we
> allow them to sit on it indefinitely, as the scarcity of the resource increases
> for everyone else.
> 
> I think my support for abolition of the needs-based allocation stems from
> a desire to see equal treatment in the market for everyone; upon further
> reflection, I can see that a similar level of equality can be achieved by
> subjecting *everyone* to the same requirements, no matter when the
> address space was registered.  Annual audits, and if the need is no
> longer shown to be present, the resource registration is revoked, applied
> equally to everyone with v4 address resources.
> 
> I suspect that my alternate option for establishing equality in the market
> will be met with a great outcry from those hoarders already holding blocks
> of address space that they know darn well don't meet a "needs-based"
> criterion.  And those holders will fight tooth and nail to hold onto
> those allocations;
> because in spite of all the rhetoric about how v4 address allocations aren't
> property, and will someday have no value...right now, deep down, they
> sure as hell believe that what they have has real value, and with increasing
> scarcity in the market, that what they have has *increasing* value in the
> market.  And, if you're holding onto a scarce resource in a time of
> increasing scarcity with no demonstrated need for the resource...well, in
> most books, that would make you a speculator.  The fact that your chunk
> of the resource was gifted to you years ago doesn't negate the fact that
> you're holding onto an unused portion of a scarce resource, thus driving
> up the market price for that resource.
> 
> So.  Let's call a spade a spade.  We already have speculation in the IPv4
> address allocation market.  We have a set of investors who have large chunks
> of address space that they have obtained without demonstrated need, and
> are holding onto them in spite of not having a demonstrated need at a time
> when scarcity is driving the value of those resources up.  We can't turn a
> blind eye to them, and claim we have to preserve "needs-based" allocations
> to keep spectators out, *because they're already here.*  If we're not willing
> to make things equitable by enforcing needs-based requirements on them,
> then the only other way to make this situation equitable is to remove the
> needs-based requirements on the rest of the participants.  And thus, I
> continue to support removal of the need-based requirement, in the
> interests of restoring equality among the market participants.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Matt
> (now to start digging through the NRPM and see if it's time to propose
> an AC action to replace "legacy" with "speculator" throughout it, in the
> interests of clarity and honesty.)

Hi Matt, 

You seem to be arguing the following:

1. "IPv4 Speculation" is bad (or maybe good for the lucky speculators, but bad/unfair for everyone else).
2. Possession of IPv4 today == "IPv4 Speculation." 
3. Therefore, anyone/everyone (today) should have an equal right to be an IPv4 speculator.

Questions:
Is there something uniquely unfair that is inherent specifically in an IPv4 holder's right to sell not just to sell IPv4, but to sell it without restriction based on current needs-based policies. In other words, is there something that makes that narrow privilege more important than any/every other right/privilege that an IPv4 holder might enjoy, e.g., in  world of IP addressing scarcity (e.g., max. freedom to expand, to add new customers, to add peers at will, reachability to/from all of the the rest of the Internet)?  Even if one thinks that that narrow selling-related privilege *is* more important and more unfair than all of the other advantages of having IPv4,  doesn't the privilege also confer to any/all subsequent IPv4 buyers? If it does confer, then (following the logic that people use to justify a transfer market in general), what makes the idea of having to buy that particular privilege *more* intolerable than the idea of having to buy any of the other privileges that every current IPv4 holder in the world currently enjoys simply by virtue of their possession of allocated/assigned IPv4? 

If you believe that RIR-era needs justification rules retroactively render legacy IPv4 assignments so unfair and illegitimate that an ex post facto equalization (to your benefit) is now justified, and the community actually ratifies that notion, I wonder how future community members will interpret that precedent a few years from now, when they start comparing what they're obliged to do/give up to get usable IP addresses to what was expected of *anyone* that was lucky enough to acquire IPv4 at any time in before IPv4 exhaustion...

Am I missing something?

Thanks, 

TV