[arin-ppml] Revised - Draft Policy ARIN-2025-1: Clarify ISP and LIR Definitions and References to Address Ambiguity in NRPM Text

[David Farmer]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 9:32 PM Jon Lewis <jlewis at lewis.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Sep 2025, David Farmer via ARIN-PPML wrote:
>
> > Please explain what is confusing about the current usage of both LIR and
> ISP?
> > The following Blog post from ARIN seems perfectly straightforward to me;
> >  https://www.arin.net/blog/2023/02/28/ISP-or-end-user/
> >
> > And the following page is about Requesting IP addresses.
> > https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/request/
> >
> >
> > They both seem to address the idea that LIR and ISP are effectively the
> same thing.
>
> Just a week ago, I asked if someone could give examples of how an ARIN
> member could be an LIR and not be an ISP, and was told "there are ways".
>
> The page referenced above is confusing, because it simultaneously says ISP
> = LIR and LIR != ISP.  If an LIR is "generally" an ISP, then that suggests
> there are circumstances in which an LIR is not an ISP.
>

Many organizations reassign addresses to other organizations, acting as
LIRs, but don't consider themselves to be ISPs, at least not by most common
definitions of the term. Some examples are Government Agencies,
Universities, and Education (K-12) Service Organizations. In the private
sector, managed service providers (MSPs) provide outsourced technology
solutions for hospitals and other organizations. They contract with ISPs on
behalf of their customers, and therefore don't think of themselves as ISPs
but as an intermediary that manages ISPs for their customers. In the
broadest sense, yes, they could all be called ISPs, but if the definition
of ISP is too narrow, there could exist LIRs that are not ISPs.

On top of that, there are also political or regulatory reasons why some
LIRs don't want to be known as ISPs, regardless of how broad you make the
definition of the term ISP.

Thanks.
-- 
===============================================
David Farmer               Email:farmer at umn.edu
Networking & Telecommunication Services
Office of Information Technology
University of Minnesota
2218 University Ave SE        Phone: 612-626-0815
Minneapolis, MN 55414-3029   Cell: 612-812-9952
===============================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/attachments/20250922/a53c1858/attachment.htm>