Joe makes a good point. Everyone is shouting "no one owns IP addresses", but that is proof by assertion. Yelling louder doesn't make it so. Neither does ARIN's assertions or their policies. What would establish IP addresses as some sort of ARIN-owned and licensed community property? Well, winning a court case like this, or congress passing a law. Frankly, those who want ARIN's ownership of IP addresses to be established, should hope Kremens put on a good case here, to establish a nice solid precedent. Who cares about when CIDR came out? It was background information and not really material to the case. Kremens was the victim of a very nasty fraud. People are acting like he's a bad guy, when, in fact, he was a victim of one of the worst cases of domain hijacking, and his original case is one that we rely on for protection today. There is a strong argument to be made for ownership of IP addressing and subsequently trading address space as a commodity, with ARIN as a commodity exchange and clearinghouse. Is this reaction people hating lawyers more than ARIN, or what? - Daniel Golding _____ From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of joe mcguckin Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 1:37 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: [Fwd: Kremen VS Arin Antitrust Lawsuit - Anyone have feedback?] I read the complaint. I don't like the fact that a lot of my friends are named in the suit, but I think there are some points worth discussing within the community: 1) IP address blocks are not 'property' "Domains are not property. The assignee of a domain has no ownership interest" Network Solutions made this same argument years ago. That was their shield against lawsuits when negligence (or worse) on NetSols part would cause a domain to be erroneously transferred. When mistakes were made, Network Solutions was notoriously unwilling to reverse the transaction to correct the error. Then they got sued for refusing to reverse a fradulent domain transfer, and they lost. The case had the side effect of setting the precedent that domains *are* in fact tangible property. Now when a registrar or registry makes a mistake, they can be legally held responsible. (What case was that? Kremen v. Network Solutions) I would say that's an improvement. 2) Why does ARIN believe that it can ignore a court order? 3) What's wrong with treating assignments like property and setting up a market to buy and sell them? There's plenty of precedent for this: Mineral rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum. If a given commodity is truly scarce, nothing works as good as the free market in encouraging consumers to conserve and make the best use of it. Joe McGuckin ViaNet Communications joe@via.net 650-207-0372 cell 650-213-1302 office 650-969-2124 fax