On 22 Jul 2019, at 4:17 PM, Matthew Kaufman <
matthew@matthew.at> wrote:
...
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.
Those are excellent questions for ADCR regarding its governance and accountability plans, but again, none of that requires any special “RIR” magic to accomplish; it simply takes a not-for-profit organization that serves its community – such entities are
quite common but they require an active and engaged community and appropriate governance structures.
There's a bit of magic. If ARIN's board of directors decided to up and start taking people's existing IPv4 allocations and selling them to Amazon to beef up the ARIN scholarship fund, the recourse would include going to IANA and noting that ARIN was no longer behaving as a responsible registrar for the global community it serves.
Here the amateur radio community has noted that ARDC's board of directors has decided to up and start taking people's existing IPv4 allocations (including a /15 in use by the German amateur radio community) and selling them to Amazon to beef up the ARDC grant fund (without engaging with the global community of radio amateurs who thought that net 44 was being held in trust for them, or engaging with even those entities/individuals who'd already been allocated address space in the block). But because ARDC isn't actually an IP address registrar of global IP space for its community as delegated by IANA, we're left with grasping at ARIN for some accountability here.
Matthew Kaufman