On 16 Sep 2022, at 3:21 PM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
instead consistently end up settling with orders that recognize ARIN’s ability to operate the registry according to the community-developed policy
That's quite an overstatement. As far as I'm aware, with respect to the legacy registrations the only order any court ever made was that within the facts of that particular case, ARIN could refuse to -record- a transfer of registration absent a contract.
Bill – What is “an IP address block assignment”? i.e. what exactly are we talking about having rights to? You talk about a transfer of something distinct from the registry entry, but don’t actually say what that is... We know what it is not – it not “the right to route a range of IP addresses on the Internet” – as ISPs control their own routers (and at no time did any of them delegate some portion of control over their network routing to USG/SRI/ISI/GSI/NSI/NetSol/ARIN…) I’ll assert that an “IP address block assignment” (regardless of when made) was the issuance of a set of rights to a specific entry in the registry database: e.g., the right to have your organization associated with a range of numbers in the Internet number registry, the right to be able to update the relevant fields of that entry (like contact info), and the right to transfer these rights to other parties in accordance with registry policy. Parties issued IP address blocks were given those rights to their particular IP address block entry in the registry database, and that registry database was transferred to ARIN at our inception. As such, if you want an IP address block entry updated, it’s necessary to comply with ARIN’s policies as set by this community. Now you may believe the IP address blocks are something other than a limited set of rights to an entry in the registry, and that’s just great. I think you’ll find that nearly everyone who wants to buy rights to an IP address block expects that the registry entry will be updated, and that the update of the entry constitutes the transfer of the rights, but you should feel free to hawk something else if you think folks will buy it. Similarly, if you believe that you can transfer an “IP address block” and somehow that gives you some legal authority over a portion of the ARIN registry, then you should avail yourself of all appropriate legal means to enforce your purported rights and effect that change. (It’s not that people haven’t come up with such interesting theories before, rather that they’ve never held up in court…) Again, to make sure there is 100% clarity: we have consistently ended up settling with orders that recognize ARIN’s ability to operate the registry according to the community-developed policy, including the application of that policy to legacy address blocks. ARIN simply doesn’t settle absent those terms, as it is fundamental principle of our inception that this community can set the policies used to administer the registry for this region. Thanks, /John John Curran President and CEO American Registry for Internet Numbers