[arin-ppml] Open Petition for ARIN-prop-266: BGP Hijacking is an ARIN Policy Violation

[Owen DeLong]

Speaking only in my role as a member of the community and not in any way representing the AC...

I do not support the petition. 

There is always tension on the border between what is in scope of ARIN policy as regards running the registry and providing good stewardship of community resources vs. interfering in the operations of the internet (e.g. being the routing police). 

While ARIN has a history of minimum allocation sizes in part dictated by community concerns over routing table growth, that is no longer the case. The current minimums reflect ARIN’s DNS and RPKI based limitations. 

Another thing to consider is that ARIN policies only apply to those entities receiving resources from ARIN and in some cases by extension to those they grant resources to through reallocation or reassignment. 

People hijacking prefixes, generally, are operating outside of those parameters to begin with, so it’s not really clear to me how such a policy provides any benefit in combatting the situation. 

Instead, it creates an appearance that ARIN has some role as arbiter of the routing tables which is not only well outside of ARIN’s mandate, but also nearly impossible for ARIN to fulfill. 

I believe the proposal is out of scope, but even if it were somehow considered in scope, I see no way in which it provides anything but additional risk to the organization while failing to offer any actual benefit to the community. 

Owen