[arin-ppml] ARIN-2012-3: ASN Transfers - Last Call

[Owen DeLong]

On May 7, 2012, at 6:25 PM, William Herrin wrote:

> On 5/7/12, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> On May 7, 2012, at 2:29 PM, William Herrin wrote:
>>> If you want the community to own the policies then a non-trivial
>>> amount of dissent means you keep discussing it. That's the nature of
>>> consensus and if you want the disparate members of the community to
>>> engage as ARIN's partners in address management, that's what it takes.
>> 
>> While having true consensus would be ideal, it's not always feasible.
>> In some cases, the AC has to weigh whether failing to move a proposal
>> with significant support forward would do a greater harm than continuing
>> to discuss it.
> 
> Hi Owen,
> 
> Would failing to move an AS transfer proposal forward this cycle do
> harm? We've survived without one for 15 years and we're not sort of AS
> numbers, at least not the 32 bit variety.
> 
IMHO, no, but, there are those that disagree with me and legitimately
so in this regard.

You will note from the draft minutes that I voted against moving that
proposal forward.

> 
>> It is a valid criticism that there has been some tendency towards a tyranny
>> of the majority of late and that the AC has trended in some cases towards
>> mistaking majority support for consensus. However, even in times of such
>> errors, I do not feel that the AC has discounted, ignored, or otherwise
>> disenfranchised any dissenting views presented in the public record.
> 
> If I have overstated the case, well, it wouldn't be the first time.
> But from your own words, you see the problem too.
> 
> 
>>> The folks who internalize rules set by 15
>>> people on a committee are largely comprised of the 15 people on the
>>> committee.
>> 
>> The last sentence just doesn't parse for me, so I'm not sure what you
>> were intending to say.
> 
> When folks are confident that the rules were made with their consent,
> they're less likely to deliberately cheat.
> 

Agreed. One of the reasons I try to encourage participation by the broadest
possible community. I also find that to the extent one can remove greed as
a motivator to break the rules, you gain greater compliance. Hence my general
opposition to transfer policies outside of the immediate (and temporary)
exigent need for an IPv4 transfer policy which I remain ambivalent at
best about.

Owen