On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 15:48:14 MDT, John Neiberger <John.Neiberger@efirstbank.com> said:
IANAL, but it appears that from a contractual perspective it is clear that ARIN retains all 'ownership' rights to the address space. They subdivide it to those who are willing to contractually agree to their conditions, but the ownership is never transferred. I would think that that is an important distinction to make.
IANAL either, but I believe that ARIN doesn't claim to own 32-bit integers. What they're providing is a *registry service* to keep track of what entities are using what ranges of 32-bit integers, to prevent duplication. There's no *requirement* that you use any particular address range, except that by community agreement, nobody wants to deal with non-registered addresses. If ARIN actually *owned* the address space, we'd not have the perennial flame-war regarding 1918-space source addresses on the global net - everybody would do a really fast and good job of implementing ingress/egress filtering because ARIN could sue you for using their addresses... :)