Niels Bakker wrote:
Address space policy has always been the result of a community consensus. Just because that consensus has shifted over the years does not mean that older entries in some database have suddenly developed into property. All it means is that the community is very friendly for not applying the new rules retroactively.
The worst part of the filing was the fact that it asserted that by allowing the previous owner to retain ownership of the netblock, they were able to allocate addresses to customers and stay in business (as if they couldn't ask ARIN for more IP addresses). The purpose of the transfer, if I read the filing correctly, was to give Kremen the right to force all routing of the block to stop to the various people using it to extort money out of them (based on the wording in the filing, that apparently is money Kremen lost). Many of the suballocated users of the netblock would probably have been innocent bystanders that are using a cheap ISP. Of course, in reality, even with the transfer of the netblock, new allocations would have been requested and granted for networks requiring them. However, how many people would have been requested to pay or forced to immediately renumber? I've had to renumber a /18 when C&W decided to drop customers here. If they had forced them unroutable (claiming ownership) while I was trying to renumber, we wouldn't be questioning the status of IP addresses as property. -Jack