[arin-ppml] Against 2013-4

Mon Jun 3 15:37:02 EDT 2013

I take issue with the assumption that "this community" is strongly for needs based assignments.  Certainly there are folks in this community who frequently and sometimes loudly voice their support for needs based assignment policies.  Then of course there are folks in this community like me who are vehemently against needs based assignments and I certainly have voiced that frequently and sometimes loudly.  There have been others who have done so as well from time to time.  

Unfortunately (IMHO) for whatever reasons - most of the current allocation policies apply a needs test of some sort.  I strongly agree with Milton that it would be much better for the ARIN community to adopt a similar change in all allocations policies that is called for in https://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2013-03 .  

I've said it before and I'll say it again that any policy that can be used to totally deny any sized allocation is against ARIN's mission statement.  I believe that only size tests and not needs tests for allocations should ever be used.  Only the size of the organization and/or the size of the existing network should be used to calculate the size of an allocation and it should never be zero.

I have seen folks comment against needs test policies in one way or another, and when no changes occur, they just stop commenting because of frustration.  Some just decide to go around "this community" and skip ARIN altogether and purchase their IPv4 needs from a third party or a broker like this site does http://www.hilcobid.net/auction/listOffers.htm?auction_id=13186&elementsPerPage=25#barranavegacaoleilao .  Just because some folks have decided to go around ARIN for their needs and stop commenting here - certainly doesn't mean that they are in agreement with ARIN's needs based policies.  It just means that they got tired of beating their heads into the wall of "needs based allocations" and went around it instead.  

If we really want to find out what the ENTIRE ARIN geographic location community thinks about this subject, I would advocate sending out some sort of questionnaire to EVERONE listed in ARIN geographic database as that is the real "community" that ARIN serves and not just the relative few who periodically comment.  It would be very interesting to see what all of the /8 holders really think and what all of the smaller legacy holders think along with the folks that regularly comment here.  I'm guessing some other points of view would be strongly expressed.  

There has been some discussion recently about making policy changes or clarifications in areas that RFC 2050 covers.  As a legacy holder (of one /24) I would recommend this community let sleeping dogs lie and not try to use policy to somehow change the status quo of legacy holder's allocations.  If this community decides they want to engage Legacy Holders it would be much better to do so directly instead of by policy.  

Also, around the time I got our Legacy /24 allocation in 1994 I also got several for some of my customers.  One of my customers was a subsidiary of American Express (though that wasn't their name) and I requested 5 Class C blocks and received 5 consecutive /24 allocations.  I still have all of the paperwork for this request including the original allocation paperwork.  The questionnaire I filled out did ask how many hosts I expected to have in the future but it did not require me or my customer to actually make use of them ever.  It did not make me prove I needed more than a /24 in any way.  It didn't ask me to prove the addresses were actually used at some later date.  The five consecutive /24's were just allocated exactly as I requested.  At the time I thought they were asking this info to survey how many future Internet users there might be since Internet usage was relatively small in 1994.  Also in case some folks don't know, there was absolutely no legal verbiage one way or the other on the questionnaire I received or on the allocation notices I received.  

Steven L Ryerse
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-----Original Message-----
From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Milton L Mueller
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2013 10:51 AM
To: 'Owen DeLong'
Cc: arin-ppml at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] Against 2013-4

> -----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. 

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