[arin-ppml] FYI -- RIPE-605 Services to Legacy InternetResource Holders

[John Curran]

On Feb 13, 2014, at 9:18 AM, David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org> wrote:
> 
>> Since you were a coauthor of RFC2050, perhaps you can explain 
>> what is supposed to happen when the approval described above 
>> does not occur?
> 
> Oddly, 2050 is silent on that.

Would you expect that a transfer in 1997 would have been put in the 
registry despite the lack of approval?  It certainly wouldn't have 
been accurate to do so, since the address block would still be held
by the original party, or does "approval" have some non-standard 
meaning in this context?  

> Of course, if you want to play the ancient history game, I might point out that most of the address allocations in question occurred prior to 2050 and ask you for the explicit policy document that disallows execution of a registry's primary function for those addresses or, since you're so fond of treating 2050 as sacred text, how is it you can quote 4.7, but choose to ignore the very first sentence of 4.1?

I believe the first sentence of RFC 2050 section 4.1 is very important,
and am not ignoring it in the least - 

"  1.  Regional Registries provide registration services as its
       primary function.  "

Registry services are the primary function; and this means that (using any 
plain reading of RFC 2050) the transfer of IP addresses from one party to
another was only to happen in the registry if the receiving party meets the 
needs-based criteria.  Processing transfers per policy is maintaining an 
accurate registry.

You may not like the need-based transfer policy, and it may not deter 'off 
book' usage of address blocks, but the party listed as the address holder 
still has control of the address block in the registry and hence is accurate.

Finally, I don't consider RFC 2050 sacred text, and hence why I supported its 
recent update as RFC 7020.  I only raised it because you asserted _ARIN_ created 
the needs-based transfer policy after the fact, which obviously isn't correct.

> However, to be honest, I'm not that interested in playing the ancient history game -- I find the whole exercise pointless and boring. I am, however, interested in what policy changes you believe it will take to get ARIN to accurately reflect reality in its registry database. What's it going to take?

I have been attempting to follow up on your suggestion to poll the 
community, but we seem to have reached an impasse because ARIN is
keeping the registry accurate and your formulation would suggest 
otherwise. Hence, my attempt at a more balanced phrasing, i.e. that 
we should "survey the ARIN community regarding the prioritization of 
needs-based transfers vs operational usefulness of registry data."
If we can come up with acceptable language, we'll figure out how to 
poll the ARIN community on this topic.

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN