[arin-ppml] Deceased Companies?

[John Curran]

> On 5 Aug 2022, at 3:48 AM, Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg at tristatelogic.com> wrote:
> 
> In my my immediately prior email on this topic I neglected to mention three
> important and entirely relevant points.
> 
> First, I should clarify the reason for my interest in this topic of dead
> resource-holding organizations.  As some but not all here may be aware,
> I personally have invested quite a lot of time and effort over the years
> in finding and exposing Bad Actors on the Internet.  In the many years
> that I have been doing this entirely uncompensated work, I

A noble endeavor indeed. 

> ...
> Second, with respect to the rather superficial legal analysis included in
> my prior email, that analysis was and is hampered somewhat by a key point
> of ignorance on my part.  Specifically, it is unclear to me if ARIN staff
> (or policy) requires that resource-holding entities sign and return a fresh
> new RSA... presumably having the latest and greatest RSA version number...
> at every point in time when such an entity has requsted (or is assigned)
> some new allocation of number resources.  Can any kind soul enlighten me
> on this point?

If one engages with ARIN to obtain new resources (or make any similar substantial
change to their number resource holdings), ARIN will seek entry into the current RSA
if the present agreement is more than two versions back.   We don’t update the RSA 
very often, but feel that some leeway in this regard is still operational sound and helps
reduce administrative overhead of working with ARIN. 

> ...
> 
> Third and lastly, I am compelled to express my profound dismay that ARIN
> staff appears to be playing a somewhat elaborate game of "hide the ball"
> when it comes to making available older / non-current versions of the RSA.
> Reasonably diligent efforts to find these older RSA versions, by me, and
> on the ARIN web site, were consistantly met with either web site "not
> found" errors or by redirections to the current and latest version (12.0)
> of the RSA, which is not at all what I was seeking.
> 
> Needless to say, the inability to obtain copies of older versions of the RSA
> makes it literally impossible to form any reasoned opinion about what various
> organizations, dead or otherwise, may or may not have been contractually
> bound to do or not do.
> ...
> I can well understand why ARIN staff and management may wish to have the
> average Joe Schmo looking only at the most current version of the RSA,
> but deliberately making older versions of this key document unavalable,
> even to researchers, is unacceptable and should be rectified forthwith.

This is not intentional (nor different than the practices of most organizations)
but rather the desire to minimize confusion and potential for parties using the
wrong version when dealing with ARIN.  However, it should be relatively easy
to provide a suitable reference archive, and we will endeavor get such setup
shortly for that purpose. 

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers