[arin-ppml] ARIN-prop-172 Additional definition for NRPM Section 2 - Legacy Resources

[Paul Vixie]

On 2012-06-09 7:30 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>> see, again, <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2008216>.
> [Milton L Mueller] 
>
> Paul, I already dealt with your arguments here, quite handily. 
> http://www.internetgovernance.org/2011/08/15/arin-and-vixie-get-nervous-about-competition/ 
>
> perhaps you should "see, again..."

thanks. i had not seen that. you appear to be arguing that i have a
conflict of interest since i'm a trustee at arin, and your article
implies that my arguments should not be taken at face value because
anyone who agrees would naturally gravitate toward arin. while i'm not
sure how the standard conflict of interest rules would apply since i'm
not paid by arin and since arin has no shareholders. do you consider it
self-dealing that my various non-remunerative activities are coherently
aligned? (wouldn't that be a virtue?)

in your attempted rebuttal you're putting a number of words in my mouth.
and arin's mouth. i don't see any basis for these assertions, and they
resplendently do not stand on their own.

the meat of the matter appears to be this text:

> It would be a simple matter for ARIN (and other RIRs) to set up
> procedures to recognize and record transactions conducted by external
> parties – if they were willing to surrender pointless “needs assessments.”

in the interest of reaching some new ending to this periodic exchange of
views, i'll do my utmost to take this seriously. "surrender" is the
wrong word since arin (as an organization) can only do what the policies
allow, and the policies are set by the community not by arin itself. if
you think the policies should be different than they are, then by now i
think you know how to change them. "pointless" is your own view, and
anyone who doesn't think it's pointless is going to have a hard time
understanding (or caring) what you're saying. you are demonstratively
not the best friend of your own point of view here.

> We have thousands of stock brokers and dozens of exchanges
> independently trading shares, but somehow the world manages to keep
> track of who does and does not own a specific quantity of critically
> important stock certificates. So ARIN does not need to control,
> mediate and set policy for all IP address transfers in order to
> maintain an accurate database of who holds which address block.

this... is a complete nonsequitur. first, your comparison of ip
addresses to stock certificates on the basis of their uniqueness fails
to address the fact that shares of stock are understood in law as a kind
of property, and are issued by corporations under securities law that
describes the specific ways they can be traded. for example, securities
law touches on all kinds of issues like insider trading and market
manipulation. there is no corpus of law anywhere that describes ip
addresses as a kind of property and seeks to control the trading in
same. i think this means that any similarity between a unique share of
stock and a unique ip address are a figment of your apparently circular
argument.

"so arin does not need..." brings us back to that pig again, which could
fly, but only if it had wings, which it does not, so, it cannot.

> [arin] simply needs to serve as a title agency where people come to
> record their transactions. It is in the self-interest of both sides of
> an IP address transaction to ensure that their transfer of rights was
> recorded and is published in a common, authoritative global Whois
> database.

i think we may have a breakthrough here. you care very deeply about the
self-interest of both sides of a transaction, and as an unremitting
anarcho-libertarian myself, i deeply resonate to that view. however, we
are not talking about a share of stock, or a fungible currency unit, or
a parcel of land, or an internet domain name here. the exclusive right
to the use of a unique identifier on the internet is not a land grant.
there is a third party at the table, which is not contemplated by the
austrian or chicago schools of economics: the community, who created the
numbering systems, and who operates the routers, has a say about who can
hold what rights, and how those rights can be transferred.

i think you "simply" need to stop thinking about ip addresses as assets
having titles which can be traded, and focus your energies on studying
what they actually are and how they differ from "property". note that if
ip addresses were property, then the authors of RFC 791 and RFC 1883
would have had an extraordinary capital gains tax bill.

> What’s really happening here is that Vixie and others at ARIN realize
> that the only way to shield themselves against losing control over and
> revenue from the IPv4 address market is to leverage their monopoly
> over the IP address registration database.

oh. damn. and for this i wasted the last 10 minutes answering this as if
it were a serious rebuttal. i don't agree with your characterization of
this as "dealt with ... quite handily." for the record i derive zero
revenue from ip address allocation. as a trustee for arin, i am a
volunteer. arin, being a 501(c)(6) non-profit industry trade
association, has no shareholders.

paul