Legal Obligation(s) of ARIN services??

[Stephen Satchell]

At 9:29 PM 1/26/97, Christopher McKeen wrote:
>To what extent will ARIN assume its legal obligations to its customers
>and assure them that these services will be carried out in the professional
>and reliable manner that represents the price paid for these services?

In my understanding of the function of a Registry, the sole purpose of said
Registry is to make sure that any address issued to an applicant is not in
legitimate use by another person.  That's all.  In the case of the IP
Registry for the Americas, the problem is compounded by technical concerns
having to do with the ability to route addresses through backbone services
-- and there are guidelines published in RFCs detailing how such problems
shall be addressed.

In the discussion of the updated proposal, Kim says that ARIN would also
take on the responsibility for maintaining the IN-ADDR.ARPA domain name
space, that space which is used to map IP numbers back to domain names.  (I
have registered my disagreement with the IN-ADDR.ARPA name space management
idea, because it means that a system administrator would have to deal with
ARIN for *part* of its domain-name service, and with another organization
for another part of domain-name service.  We give out numbers.  The Domain
Name assignment system, currently part of NSI's function, associates
numbers with names and names with numbers.)

It's a book-keeping job.

>Does John Q. Isp have legal recourse to recover those damages through a
>lawsuit against ARIN in a U.S. Court of Law?

Of course, for errors and omissions.  Under my modification of the ARIN
charter, we would not maintain name servers of any kind, so any failure of,
say, reverse lookups would be the responsibiity of the Domain Name manager,
not ARIN.  The only error we could make is to issue the *same* addresses to
multiple entities.  Such problems would be covered under Errors & Omissions
liability insurance.

---
Stephen Satchell, Satchell Evaluations
http://www.accutek.com/~satchell for contact info
Opinions expressed are my own PERSONAL opinions.