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

[John Curran]

On Feb 13, 2014, at 3:05 PM, Morizot Timothy S <Timothy.S.Morizot at irs.gov> wrote:
> Hmmm. I'll also note that transfer of title for a car you own is not the best analogy. Even when we obtained our legacy allocations back in the early 90s, they weren't "sold" to us. They remained an Internet number resource allocated to us for our use. So the better analogy would perhaps be trying to transfer a car lease you currently hold to another person. (It's definitely still a flawed analogy, but possibly better than the title transfer analogy.)

Several folks have noted that these analogies are all imperfect, and 
it's even worse than described when it comes IP address blocks issued
because they are unique only because of the fact that they were issued
out of a particular registry.

You can use any number you wish in your routers, and you can even run 
your own registry and coordinate unique [within your registry] block 
assignments (and there was at least one industries that did this for
their own private VPN-like connectivity among suppliers), but what 
someone refers to as their IP address block is actually their "IP 
address block assignment" from the Internet Registry system, i.e. one 
particular coordinated registry intended for general purpose IP 
assignments of global scope.

This means that the registration in the registry is actually the only
tangible entity involved here; i.e. back to analogies, there is no car 
at all - just the registration.  References that imply your "IP address 
block" is a license for use on the global Internet is clearly specious, 
since those routers are operated by others who never granted such rights.
Aside from the uniqueness provided by the registration entry and rights 
to same, it's hard to see what folks are trying to "sell"...

FYI,
/John
 
John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN