[arin-ppml] Unreachable address blocks (was: Re: Have we REALLY got to this sad state of disrepair?)

[William Herrin]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 4:33 PM John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
> Regarding the legacy resource holders who haven’t signed a
> registry services agreement, ARIN needs to exercise significant
> caution – but that has little to do with authority of ARIN over the
> registry or ability to enforce registry policy.   It’s much more
> basic than that - legacy resource holders received their blocks
> from parties who were issuing them pursuant to agreements
> with the US Government to do so, and under circumstances
> where the corresponding responsibilities were not clearly spelt out.

Hi John,

This would be so much easier to resolve if ARIN considered IP
addresses to be ordinary property. The law has procedures for dealing
with apparently abandoned property, the following of which would
insulate ARIN from risk.

It seems to me that ARIN faces much the same quandary here as folks
trying to locate copyright owners. When a book falls out of
publication and the author can't be found, it goes into a legal limbo
where you can't even be sure when the copyright will expire. Can't
lawfully copy it. Or republish it. Or write a new story based on it.
It's just stuck, fodder for the pirates.


> Making things even more exciting is that, while many of those with
> legacy address blocks obtained them “to connect to the Internet”,
> that is neither uniform nor is it clear that such was ever intended
> as requirement

Actually, I'd say it's rather clear that was NOT ever intended as a
requirement... and STILL ISN'T. But that's a side-show.


> The community could make a policy that says, “After exercising a
> certain level of effort to contact a resource holder, a complete
> lack of response shall provide ARIN a basis to recover the
> address block...”,  _but_
> Adoption of such a policy would disregard the potential impact to
> those who hold legacy number resource blocks but just haven’t
> maintained current contact information over the last 25 years
> (whether for lack of effort or just not knowing that ARIN even
> existed, was administering the registry, or that they had the
> ability update their contact information all a while without any
> contract or fee.)

More to the point, sooner or later someone would pop out of the
woodwork and sue you. With a muddy claim to being able to effect
changes in policy over the legacy address block and having not
followed any legally recognized process for reclaiming them, the
judge's displeasure would be... substantial.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin
bill at herrin.us
https://bill.herrin.us/