[Services-wg] ARIN Services WG - CKN23 materials for your consideration (case #2)

[John Curran]

On Jun 14, 2016, at 3:40 PM, John Curran <jcurran at arin.net<mailto:jcurran at arin.net>> wrote:
...
Jim Smith gets an /24 for his networking company “Sprockets” in 1994,
so that he can connect to the Internet.  He gets  /24) and connects to
the Internet via one the early commercial ISPs.

The netblock reads as follows:

Sprockets
4131 El Camino Real, Palo Alta CA
X.Y.Z/24
Jim Smith
jim at well.com<mailto:jim at well.com>

Apparently, Jim left Sprockets sometime in the late 90’s…

Twenty years later, Jim has called and is very upset with ARIN for having
“munged it" all up - ...

Jim’s not a happy camper, and wants to know why ARIN disassociated him
with his address block randomly sometime after 2010.   Jim says that he’s
been been using the address block for his house since leaving Sprockets
(no public IP, but he just uses NAT and connects via his public cable modem
IP address.) ...Because we no longer allow him
as a abuse contact to update the DNS servers, he can’t even use “his” IP
block now that he’s getting a nice new Internet connection.

Now on to the more dangerous variation of this story - it starts the same, sounds
the same to ARIN, and it is only in a few (unknown to us) details that it differs -

    - Spockets was sold to Widgets, Inc sometime in late ‘90s
    - Widgets renumbered the servers when they moved them to Widgets
      HQ  and promptly forgot about the X.Y.Z/24 IP address block...

It’s highly likely (absent a transaction to the contrary) that the rights to the
X.Y.Z/24 IP address block are held by Widgets Inc.

This hasn’t prevented technical contacts for long-lost companies from trying
to hijack unused address blocks and monetize them (i.e. if ARIN would just
play along…)

The change of tech contact to abuse significantly reduces the risk of hijack,
although it could be argued that it excessively impacts legacy address holders
(those who have not been updating their IP address records over time.)

/John
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