Legal Obligation(s) of ARIN services??

[Alan Barrett]

Stephen Satchell wrote:
> 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. 

No.  An important function of the registry is to check that applications
for address space are reasonable.  (That there is a legitimate need for
the address space requested.)

> 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. 

That's very sensible.  ARIN would know which address blocks are issued to
which organisations, and would be able to keep the in-addr.arpa
delegations in synch with the address assignments. 

> (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.

They are very different parts, and it's convenient to separate them. 

--apb (Alan Barrett)