In defense of John and ARIN, if you did not recognize that ARDC represented an authority for this resource, who would be?  The complaints would have been even more shrill if ARIN took it upon themselves to “represent” the amateur radio community and had denied the request or re-allocated the assignment.  IANA would have been just as out of line making decisions for the community.  In my opinion the community is at fault for not recognizing the value of their assigned resource and putting mechanisms in place for its management (or maybe just not understanding the power that the ARDC represented).  At the end of the day, someone has to represent an authority for an assignment and ARDC was as close as you could get.  About the closest other organization would have been someone like the ARRL but even then you have a US organization representing a worldwide loosely coupled community.  I suppose there is a UN basis for worldwide management but does anyone here think that any UN organization would be a trustworthy administrator.

I think the decision to sell off some of the block makes sense given the size and current usage.   After all, by definition amateur radio is about advancing the state of the art and experimenting, v6 allocations are not scarce at all.  The problem here is that the amateur radio community does appear to think they were well represented by the ARDC which I would have to say is their fault.   The original allocation was made a long time ago when there was so much space that it had no real value.  What everyone seems to be bent out of shape about is that there was a value to this block and someone got paid for it.  This does not seem to put the community in peril of running out of space.  How you share in the dividends of this sale is another unsolvable problem.  How do you allocate this dividend to a worldwide community with no centralized membership database?

The original assignment of this block seems to have been a couple of people with an idea that was forward looking.  The fact that the authority for something like that was somewhat murky is not at all surprising.  In general, a lot of older assignments become clouded and disputable through numerous acquisitions and changes in control especially at a time that those assignment were not seen as having real value.  ARIN is in a sticky position here no matter what call they make.  I don’t envy John’s job in the least J

Steven Naslund

Chicago IL

>Respectfully John, this wasn't a DBA or an individual figuring the org name field on the old email template couldn't be blank. A class-A was >allocated to a _purpose_. You've not only allowed but encouraged that valuable resource to be reassigned to an organization, this ARDC, and then >treated the organization as a proxy for the purpose. No one asked you to do that. Nothing in the publicly vetted policies demanded that you attach >organizations to the purpose-based allocations and certainly nothing demanded that you grant such organizations identical control over the >resources as the control possessed by folks who were the intended direct recipients of assignments.

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>This is a rare day, indeed, but I find myself largely agreeing with Bill here.

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>The only thing I dispute here is that I’m pretty sure that the principals of ARDC did request ARIN to make ARDC the controlling organization of the resource. >The question here is whether or not it was appropriate or correct for ARIN to do so.

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>IMHO, it was not. IMHO, ARIN should have recognized that this particular block was issued for a purpose and not to an organization or individual. That contacts >were volunteers from the community that agreed to take on a task. Even if the block ended up contactless, it should not have been open to claim and certainly not >to 8.3 or 8.4 partial transfer to another organization away from that purpose.