[arin-ppml] Draft Policy ARIN-2014-9: Resolve Conflict Between RSA and 8.2 Utilization Requirements

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 6:39 AM, John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
......
> Matthew -
>
> A typical example
.....
> At this point, some number of requesters will abandon the process.

I can, for some values of understanding, understand this.

But I think that is a failure by the requester, not ARIN,
and we should not change ARIN because the requester
wants it to be easy to do what they want to do, whenever
they want to do it, however they want to do it.

History/Background/Reasoning:

At a previous $dayjob$, it took quite some time to pull together
a change.  We had legacy resources, and therefore no formal
contract with ARIN.  At one point, we needed to get the
records accurate (for internal reasons, not due to M&A).

Over the (10-15) years since the records had last been
touched:

* We (well, USPS) had changed our mailing address
* We (well, PacBell) had changed our area code
* We (well, the funding agency) had decided to
  change our organizational name
* We (as part of the previous item) had "mostly"
  changed all the local business records, which
  meant there were few records under the old name
* Everyone who was named on the original ARIN records
  had moved on, and contact to/by those individuals
  was not viable.
* The only thing we had not done was relocate
  (but, of course, the mailing address change sort
  of suggested we might have).

The issue was that since ARIN services were "free",
and managed (really informally) out of the IT group,
it had never occurred to the people in the business
office (who coordinated all these changes with the
local authorities, and the businesses that we had
contracts with), and the local IT people did not choose
to be bothered with updating records they did not
have to update (things worked OK, why do anything?)

ARIN, in my mind, quite legitimately looked at my
request to update the records with some level of
questioning.  Sure, I wished ARIN had just taken
my word for everything (I am an upstanding honest
guy, trust me :-).  Eventually, thanks to the excellent
ARIN staff, we did manage to update our records,
but it took a lot of elapsed time, and pulling together
what documentation I could find was not (always)
easy (and the business office people who had dealt
with other contract updates and documentation at
the time of the previous changes had also moved on.
A query to the current staff went something like
"What change of business documentation?")

Whose "fault" was this?  Actually, it was the IT
departments staff informal processes for what should
always have been a formal process for keeping the
records accurate.  Just like other business records.

Now that we (well, they, I was surplussed) have a
formal contract with ARIN (I also spent many many
many hours regarding the LRSA, which consul
eventually agreed was goodness) I suspect that they
(the business office) will keep the business records
more accurate should other changes occur.

<soapbox>

Any M&A, or organization changes, have a cost
regarding business records, and it is incumbent
on the organization to be prepared to pay that cost
for changes.  Updating ARIN records (and the cost
of doing so) is no different, and should not have a
special "out" just because it can be take time or
the people involved did/do not want to invest that
effort.  The days of informal handshake number
deals are (or should be) long over.  Get over it, and
do the (boring, painful, but necessary) work.

</soapbox>

Gary