[arin-ppml] Against 2013-4

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----

> Quite recently, we have seen repeated demonstrations of strong support for
> needs basis from the community.

We have? Do you mean two ARIN people, Bill and Chris, speaking out at a RIPE meeting? 
I would not deny that there is a small core of people in North America who are religiously devoted to the idea of needs assessments. Maybe we are talking about a dozen people at most.
But the consensus within the RIPE APWG is pretty clearly in favor of the no need proposal, and the topic is highly controversial even within the ARIN region.  

> Needs basis and documented justified need have been required since the
> days when Jon Postel tracked IP address assignments in a notebook, so I am
> not sure how you can claim that this concept was developed in the final
> death throes of IPv4.

No, I challenge this on a factual basis. The main legacy holders from the mid-1980s - MIT, GE, the military, etc. - were not subject to needs assessments as we use that term today. 
If they were, you have to explain how MIT and a few others have ended up giving back large chunks, effectively admitting that they did not need them? If they did not need them, how did they get them? This is probably not a very fruitful argument in that it is not forward-looking, but I do want to make it clear that claims that "we have always done it this way" are just false. 

> I'm well aware of your desire to move to a world where IP number resources
> management is as dysfunctional as radio spectrum management is today.
> (One need look no further than the history of the 220Mhz band for an
> example of this dysfunction).

Owen, having studied radio allocation since 1981 and having served at the FCC as an intern in the 80s, I know a thing or two about how radio spectrum allocation worked prior to auctions. And if you consider that world of beauty contests, political pull and allocations narrowly and wastefully dedicated to specific services to be a paragon of efficiency and fairness, I have some reports for you to read.