On Thu, 9 May 2002 20:17:32 -0400 (EDT), David R Huberman wrote:

I'm not a lawyer and cannot answer the questions you pose.

However I fail to see why the interesting legal principles you are espousing have anything to do with the original topic of this thread: an upstream revoking an assignment upon the severing of its relationship with its downstream.

Because the upstream agreed by contract to be bound by the terms of ARIN's address space allocation and assignment guidelines. So if ARIN's guidelines specify a grace period to renumber and that grace period was not given, the upstream is in violation of their contract with ARIN. I'm arguing that the downstream has legal standing to litigate that violation. There are any number of documents that specify grace periods for renumbering. So the question is, do any of these meet the status of "ARIN address space allocation and assignment guidelines"? If they do, then the downstream has a legal argument that the upstream is in violation of a contract to which the downstream is an intended beneficiary. The paragraph below is from a documented specifically identified as an IP allocation guideline: "IP addresses are allocated to ISPs in contiguous blocks, which should remain intact. Fragmentation of blocks is discouraged. To avoid fragmentation, ISPs are encouraged to require their customers to return address space if they change ISPs. Therefore, if a customer moves to another service provider or otherwise terminates its contract with an ISP, it is recommended that the customer return the network addresses to the ISP and renumber into the new provider's address space. The original ISP should allow sufficient time for the renumbering process to be completed before requiring the address space to be returned." So now we can argue over what "recommended" and "should" mean. If a person signs a contract that says they "should" do X, they probably will need to show good reason to not do Y if I'm harmed by that decision. Other statements may be more definitive. This particular dispute isn't important enough to me for me to do all the necessary research. I'm just trying to suggest an important legal angle that may have been overlooked. DS