The change in character/purpose of the network has operational impacts to me, and as such should have been done as an IANA action (as the original purpose was arguably also set by IANA action, when IANA was Jon Postel, and simply not documented very well):
I am the network administrator for a 501(c)(3) amateur radio club that operates a digital microwave network licensed via FCC Part 101 (commercial microwave), FCC Part 15 ("unlicensed" ISM) and FCC Part 97 (amateur radio). The Part 97 links are, by law, restricted to amateur radio uses. One way to ensure this is to filter based on the fact that
44.0.0.0/8 is for international amateur radio use only. That has changed as a result of ARIN's consent to a "transfer" to an entity that will not be using these for the originally stated purpose. We have a /23 allocated within
44.0.0.0/8 and it is likely that as we expand we will need additional address space, so the transfer of some of the unallocated space is of concern for that reason as well.
What *should* have happened at the time of the formation of ARIN and the other regional registries is that either 1) the
44.0.0.0/8 block have been delegated to a special-purpose RIR incorporated to manage the amateur radio allocations within this block (which is what
ampr.org has been doing, but not as an IANA-recognized community-managed RIR); or 2) the
44.0.0.0/8 block have been delegated to another RIR (e.g., ARIN) that could have special policies applicable only to that block and managed by the community.
I would guess that in either case, the odds that the community would have decided to peel off 1/4 of the space and sell it to a commercial entity would have been low, and that the odds that IANA would have agreed to go along with such a thing at least as low.
Instead we're here, because ARIN treated "Amateur Radio Digital Communications" not as a purpose (that happened to not be documented well via RFC or other process) but as an organization name that anyone could adopt, given sufficient documentation. Despite the fact that the block was already being used in a way that you'd expect an RIR to be behaving, not the way the organization has behaved.
Again, I'm sure that this was all well-intentioned... but nobody from ARDC asked any of the hams like me who've been sending TCP/IP over ham radio since it was possible, and have active allocations within the 44 net what we thought about this idea. And nobody from ARIN asked us if we thought ARDC was a suitable proxy for our interests in the special use of the space either when the registration was transferred to the corporation or when the registration stopped being used solely for its original purpose. That's why a real RIR for this space would have had a policy development process where *the community* could weigh in on ideas like "sell of 1/4 of it so we can have a big endowment". Which, heck, we might have all agreed to... if there was some transparency.
Matthew Kaufman