[arin-ppml] Deceased Companies

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Courts only have jurisdiction on their own countries.  If a gorilla 
organization were to go after ARIN with US attorneys then ARIN could 
easily move to Sweden or some place like that where US law is 
irrelevant.  However I have yet to read any sort of cogent legal 
argument under US law that would allow any company to exercise any 
authority over ARIN on number resources that they do not have a signed
LRSA or RSA in place over.  This straw man has been floated so many 
times on this mailing list that even John Curran has given up responding 
to it.

I will point out that there's a LOT of gorilla sized organizations like 
Fortune 500 (and the US Government itself) that have a vested interest 
in seeing ARIN in the US and functioning.  They would quickly shut down 
any attempt by an idiot to break things.  What would happen is an 
organization would file a lawsuit against ARIN in a US court and the 
Justice Department as well as DoD would file a friend of the court brief 
saying that any "win" by gorilla organization suing ARIN would result in 
widespread instability on the Internet and threaten the smooth 
functioning of it.  For amusement they might even point out that the 
court's primary communications mechanism would be threatened.  IT would 
be a case of 600 pound gorilla vs 6000 pound gorilla and the court would 
likely order the parties to settle out of court if they didn't 
immediately dismiss it as not under their jurisdiction.

This is what was done with the USL lawsuit that tied up the BSD kernel 
files.  USL thought exactly like you, Steven.  But when their lawsuit 
began to threaten the Open Source movement, USL was bought by another 
gorilla sized org, Novell, that fired almost all the USL attorneys and 
told the remaining ones to settle out of court or else.  That removed 
the cloud over FreeBSD and allowed it to become easily the most popular 
OS for network servers. (until Linux later eclipsed it - but even today 
the BSD network stack is hundreds of times faster than the Linux network 
stack.)

There are plenty of other examples like this.  The Fortune 500 by and 
large are NOT interested in picking fights with quasi-government 
institutions like ARIN and frequently pressure political organizations 
and others behind the scenes to shut their pieholes and submit.  Or they 
starve the org of money and push off the lawsuit until the agitator runs 
out of money and disappears.

I am aware it is a conservative dream that there's these huge wealthy 
companies that hate any government and constantly undermine it.  The 
reality is precisely the opposite.

In my experience most conservative political theory anti-government 
pushers are quite out of their element when it comes to dealing with and 
understanding global organizations such as the many that are funded by 
the UN.  Continue dreaming but what you are hoping would come to pass is 
simply not how the world works.  Not today, at any rate (and hopefully, 
NEVER)

Ted

On 8/8/2022 8:28 PM, Steven Ryerse wrote:
> This thinking completely ignores that these gorilla sized organizations like Fortune 500 companies have legions of attorneys that would bottle up any attempt to enforce rescinding resources from legacy holders who have not signed an agreement with ARIN. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fair however you want to decide what fair is, it matters what would hold up in court.
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Aug 8, 2022, at 11:03 PM, Fernando Frediani <fhfrediani at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 08/08/2022 22:24, Jay Hennigan wrote:
>>> <clip>
>>>> So no, you are NOT correct.  It IS ARIN's business what you are doing
>>>> with your large legacy block.
>>>
>>> If you haven't signed an LRSA, how is it any of ARIN's business what
>>> you do with your legacy block?
>> It has been already explained here.
>> If community chooses to have a policy in that sense to deal with these
>> resources a signed contract or not is irrelevant.
>>
>> Bottom line is it doesn't matter the reason, these blocks should not be
>> held idle just because someone decades ago received them. Addresses are
>> to connect people to the Internet, not to be help idle another decade
>> just because some organizations have some weird strategy to keep them
>> that way damaging the capacity to have more people connected.
>>
>> By the way, it is common people don't like to have to any kind of
>> questions or to have to give any explanations, but for standard blocks
>> it is always of of ARIN or any RIR business how they blocks are used.
>> Blocks were once assigned and justified on a need basis and according to
>> certain rules. If these blocks are found to be used for proposes that
>> are contrary to those rules at the best scenario the resource holder has
>> to give enough explanations in order to keep them otherwise they may be
>> revoked.
>>
>> Fernando
>>
>>
>>
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