[arin-ppml] Circumvention and operational usefulness of the registry (was: Re FYI -- RIPE-605 Services to Legacy Internet Resource Holders)

[John Curran]

On Feb 11, 2014, at 5:12 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com<mailto:owen at delong.com>> wrote:
(drc)
Needs testing, in and of itself, is not the issue.  What is at issue is what ARIN does when a transfer occurs (and they have, do, and will occur) outside of "justified" need.  As a _registry_, I believe ARIN's role (as with IANA and all other RIRs) is to maintain accurate records.

You've made your position clear. The majority of the ARIN community does not appear to agree with you. Can you provide any evidence to support your claim that they "have, do, and will occur outside of justified need"?

So far, this is a popular refrain among those that seek to eliminate the stewardship role from the RIRs, but I have yet to see anyone present hard evidence that a significant amount of this has, does, or will occur.

Owen -

   I'll agree in principle with your point that transfers are not occurring outside
   of ARIN policy, but then must note that David's fundamental concern is still
   quite real.

   There is a single global Internet number registry system, and it is administered
   by the 5 RIRs and the IANA.  Each address block is associated with a single
   unique party.  An "IP address block" is, for all practical purposes, the rights
   that come association of a unique party with an entry in the registry.

   As I have said before, if someone thinks that they've obtained rights to an
   address block, but we can't transfer them in the registry due to lack of
   compliance with policy, then it's questionable whether they have obtained
   anything of value since the original address holder will still hold the rights.

   However, this does not prevent parties from effectively transferring control
   via any number of interesting gyrations (suballocation/lease to another party
   via nominal "services" relationship, locking up future right of transfer without
   affecting registration today, extreme corporate restructuring and M&A work,
   etc.)   There is ample desire by some to transfer regardless of ARIN policy,
   it is only going to increase with IPv4 free pool depletion, and there are
   practical limits to the ability to create and enforce policy to counteract
   such efforts.

   Even though I believe that ARIN maintains a technically accurate registry
   despite these gyrations, those circumventions that do occur deprive the
   community of the expected operational benefits being able to readily reach
   the user of the address space.  Ergo, David's fundamental concern remains
   valid, in that the combination of ARIN's adherence to community-developed
   policy plus the economic activities of a few will result in a registry which is
   less operationally useful, despite its recording of the legally correct parties.

   So, while I strongly disagree that transfers have occurred outside of policy,
   there are certainly cases where parties have gained effective beneficial use
   of address blocks, with potentially impact to the operational registry benefits
   as a result.   The community remains in control of this tradeoff, and has to
   date indicated that the benefits of the need-based transfer policy are worth
   both the procedural implications in transfer processing as well as a technically
   accurate but less operationally helpful registry.

FYI,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN


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