[arin-ppml] 2015-2

[John Curran]

On Jun 4, 2015, at 11:58 AM, Matthew Kaufman <matthew at matthew.at<mailto:matthew at matthew.at>> wrote:

On 6/4/2015 8:36 AM, John Curran wrote:
On Jun 4, 2015, at 10:43 AM, Mike Burns <mike at iptrading.com<mailto:mike at iptrading.com>> wrote:
I refused to cooperate with any needs test but told them I would send them a copy of the contract and they could also communicate with the seller.

PPML Folks -

    I believe we are expected to follow the community-developed policy and
    that means that parties which don’t provide the documentation necessary
    to allow needs-assessment cannot receive number resource via transfer.


We need better language for this. Mike "received number resource via transfer". What he didn't receive was "a transfer of a record in the ARIN registry", because he didn't provide the documentation necessary for the community-developed policy for recording a transfer in that registry.

But he's got a contract which - though I have not seen it myself - I would not at all be surprised does in fact transfer the right to use those integers as addresses on the global Internet from someone else to Mike.

Matthew -

Bingo!  What exactly was transferred by that contract, and how did the original party have the
“rights” that they claimed to sell to Mike?  If it’s rights in the registry, we know those only transfer
per the policies of the community.  If it’s something else, where do those rights originate and
what exactly are the rights being sold?

We’ve got many transfers of address blocks being done where the contract says “transfer of
the rights to use and be associated with the IP address entry in the Internet number registry”
For such transfers, the original party can show the RSA or LRSA as proof that they have the
rights to which they speak, or can point to the Whois and ask ARIN (as the registry admin) to
confirm such if they do not happen to have an L/RSA.  In such cases, the recipient receives
the same rights.   All of this is fairly clear, and makes a lot of sense to judges (at least from
my decade or so dealing with it.)

In the alternative formulation, someone sold Mike (as you put it) the "the right to use those
integers as addresses on the global Internet”…   It is not at all clear how someone ever
obtained that right so that it could be sold, or even how that right is enforceable since “the
global Internet” would imply the entities that operate the global routing table.

Do you believe that ARIN issues " "the right to use those integers as addresses on the global
Internet” with our IPv4 and IPv6 blocks that we assign out today?

I know that legally we have no way of stating we are giving someone “the right to use those
integers as addresses on the global Internet” - at best, we can say that we provide them
exclusive association and use in the Internet numbers registry system, including the right
to transfer in accordance with policy.

(Mind you, we could actually say “the exclusive right to use in the global Internet routing table
as maintained by ARIN’s registry users” but doing that would require that ARIN’s registry users
be obligated to only route blocks on behalf of the parties listed in the registry… does anyone
really want this obligation with the Internet numbers registry system?  As someone whose run
several Internet service providers, I personally wouldn’t wish that if I were still doing so, but
“rights” have to come from somewhere and if they are anything more that rights to entries in
the registry, we need to figure out fairly quickly what they are, and how they are made real.)

As I said earlier, all of this becomes quite important if parties are to have legal rights that they
can rely upon and enforce in court.

Thanks,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN


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