[arin-ppml] 2014-1 Out of Region Use

[Tony Hain]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On
> Behalf Of Jon Lewis
> Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 2:32 PM
> To: Milton L Mueller
> Cc: arin-ppml at arin.net
> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] 2014-1 Out of Region Use
> 
> On Wed, 25 Feb 2015, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> 
> > Jon
> > Yes, it's clear that you support the intent of 2014-1, which is to
> > reconcile actual staff practice with an approved policy. But it also
> > sounds like you think our threshold requirement can be gamed?  The
> > "speaking Romanian" issue (or more likely, speaking Chinese) has been
> > the subject of fierce debates. Do you have specific suggestions for
> > how we could fix this?
> 
> I haven't thought of anything yet that I don't think would be trivial to
game.
> Operating in region could be accomplished with as little as one cloud VM.
> "Doing business in" could be done with a Delaware shell company that
"exists
> in region", but only on paper.
> 
> This may be too arbitrary, but what if to qualify to be permitted to
> use/request resources from ARIN for out of region use, in addition to
what's
> already in 2014-1, you had to be an ARIN member for some minimum
> amount of time (i.e. already have resources managed by ARIN)?  1 year?
> The idea would be to make it harder for a completely "out of region"
> entity to come to ARIN under this new policy and game the system and use
> ARIN as an alternative to their "local" RIR.

Back up and figure out what problem is being solved.  The primary reason
RIR's became possessive about their territory was "absurd protection of
their precious IPv4 allocations".  Rewind to the pre-RIR timeframe, and
allocations were global, and use was global. The RIRs were brought in to
simplify the process, not fragment it.  10 years ago I suggested that once
the IANA pool was depleted that the RIR holding the largest block take that
role, so that the customer interface could remain the same within each
region, and the entire pool could burn down smoothly. I was shouted down
globally because the greedy wanted to horde whatever they managed to get
from IANA. 

Are we trying to protect the RIR's claimed autonomy over geography, or
simplify the process of distribution for a global resource? If it is the
latter as it started out to be, the definition of "out of region" is
off-planet. If it is the former, why do people continue to fight against
NIR's? If you want absolute autonomy, you need somebody capable of
protecting your defined geography, and that usually becomes police or
military. Make up your collective mind about your stated objective and make
policy fit that. As far as I know the stated objective is to facilitate
allocations of a global resource, so trying to restrict what the recipient
does with it would appear to be out of scope.

Tony