[arin-ppml] ARIN-prop-171 Section 8.4Modifications:ASNandlegacy resources

[Owen DeLong]

The following is strictly my own opinion. IANAL and I did not ask a lawyer about it. It is not intended as an expression of any opinion of ARIN, the AC, or anyone other than myself.

On Jun 12, 2012, at 6:51 AM, Milton L Mueller wrote:

> Jo, glad to see you back away from the "psychotic" remark. 
> 
> As for confusion about what property is, it is well accepted among political economists that there can be property rights in intangible assets. A property right is defined in economics as the right to exclude, the right to use and the benefit from the use, and the right to trade or assign to others. 

Interesting that you use and in this definition. Since you use and, this does not, from my perspective, fit IP addresses as the right to exclude and the right to use are quite unclear even WRT ARIN issued addresses covered under RSA.

Yes, there is a de facto tendency to be able to use and to use with at least some exclusivity. However, neither of those abilities is imbued or conveyed in the ARIN registration or governed by ARIN policy. Those abilities are an individual choice of each operator actually controlling routers and are not universal or in any way under control of ARIN or the registrant.

> So to shift slightly to another context, you think that telephone number portability plans, which facilitated competition by giving end users a property right in their number, allowing them to move them from carrier to carrier, was a bad thing? After all, a telephone number "allows you to receive [calls] and for others to find you" and thus conforms exactly to your definition of an address.

Telephone numbers were first divorced from the service delivery topological hierarchy before that was made possible in the telephone network. No such divorce has yet occurred in IP. As such, the semantics are necessarily quite different.

Imagine trying to implement number portability prior to SS7 and you should get some idea of what this means in an IP context today.

> By the way, whether the community can take away property rights has nothing to do with whether the rights are property rights or whether it is a good thing to assign them in the first place. E.g., in certain countries tanks claiming the mandate from "the community" can arrive at your door and expropriate your land. Doesn't mean your land isn't property, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. 

No such property rights as you define them exist. The community neither gives them nor takes them away because they are fictitious to begin with.

The community controls policy over how the ARIN databases are updated. To the extent that legacy holders are effected by the contents of those databases, they are subject to ARIN policies whether or not they have any agreement with ARIN. Outside of concerns for what is contained in the ARIN databases, legacy holders have little or no implications from ARIN policy.

Fortunately, the internet works because most people that run connected routers on the largest set of interconnections and interconnected routers ("the internet") at least so far abide (mostly) by the contents of the ARIN databases. To the extent that remains true if legacy holders diverge from the ARIN database, they could have interesting problems getting or keeping their networks connected with "the internet".

Owen




> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> I think that this conversation demonstrates some deep confusion over
>> what property is.
>> 
>> Property: are those tangible assets that you own. You know, the hardware
>> you use to provide the service on. You bought them.  This stuff is not
>> unlike a house, or perhaps one could argue, a mobile home.
>> 
>> Address: is that thing you get from the community which allows you to
>> receive mail, and for others to find you. And the community can vote to
>> change it. And does, not often, but perhaps more often than many people
>> expect.
>> 
>> I find it totally amusing that "allows you to receive mail, and for
>> others to find you" amazingly sums up both the real uses of physical and
>> IP address ;-)  But neither one is owned, and both can be changed or
>> even taken away if the community votes to do so.
>> 
>> --
>> Jo Rhett
>> Net Consonance : net philanthropy to improve open source and internet
>> projects.
>> 
>> 
>> 
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