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

[John Curran]

On 2 May 2019, at 11:35 AM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us<mailto:bill at herrin.us>> wrote:

On Wed, May 1, 2019 at 11:50 PM Fernando Frediani <fhfrediani at gmail.com<mailto:fhfrediani at gmail.com>> wrote:
Why people always believe they "own" IP address space and nobody can
take it from them as if it was a router or a server purchased with a
invoice and declared in their annual balance ?

Several reasons.

1. Revocation of a properly registered address space has never happened before, at least not in North America. The few times any sort of revocation has happened is when there was provable fraud in the -original- application, ownership was claimed by someone who was provably acting without the authorization of the original registrant, or periodic registratino fees consented to under written contract with ARIN were not paid for an extended period of time. Over ARIN's existence there have been plenty of opportunities for ARIN to revoke addresses for other bad behaviors including violations of the policy manual. They have always declined to do so.

The legal Doctrine of Laches more or less says that a right not enforced is a right you do not have, regardless of writings to the contrary. ARIN has never enforced a claim incompatible with the registrants' ownership of their IP addresses.

2. Prior to 1997, the documents associated with registration neither expressed nor implied any right for the registry to revoke a registration for any reason.

3. If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. The registrant has exclusive control of the block of the number resource to the extent that use by anyone else on the Internet is universally held to be abusive. They can be sold or rented without permission or attachment and bought with minimal registration paperwork (or none if you're willing to operate on a contract with the averred registrant rather than updating the registration). Addresses are used in a manner that closely aligns with the common law understanding of an intellectual property. For a court to find otherwise, a litigant would have to affirmatively prove that this thing which quacks like a duck is in fact a zebra. This has not been done and there is reason to believe it is not doable.

That's why folks like me believe we own our IP addresses

Bill -

ARIN has full operational control over the ARIN registry, so if you believe that your issued IP address blocks are the rights to specific entries in the ARIN registry, then you certainly don’t have any property rights to same. ARIN does administer the ARIN registry in accordance with the community-developed policies. and that enforcement includes revocations of address space from parties for reasons other than non-payment.

If you believe that your “IP addresses” are something other than the assigned rights to entries in the ARIN registry, then that’s fine - many people in this world have interesting beliefs, but that doesn’t affect in the least the ability of ARIN to administer its registry per the community-developed policies.

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers




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