John, On Apr 12, 2010, at 5:23 AM, John Curran wrote:
On this matter we do agree, since allocations prior to ARIN's formation were generally made pursuant to a US Government contract or cooperative agreement.
As we're both aware, Jon was funded in part via the ISI Teranode Network Technologies project. Folks who were directly involved have told me that IANA-related activities weren't even identified in the original contracts until the mid- to late-90s (around the time when lawsuits were being thrown at Jon because of the domain name wars -- odd coincidence, that) when the IANA activities were codified as "Task 4". IANAL, but it seems a bit of a stretch to me for ARIN to assert policy control over resources allocated prior to ARIN's existence without any sort of documentation that explicitly lists that policy control in ARIN's predecessor (ever). Like I said, it'll be an interesting court case. Regards, -drc