Squeezing IPs out of ARIN

Wed Apr 25 15:31:44 UTC 2012

On Apr 24, 2012, at 9:57 PM, Jack Bates wrote:

> On 4/24/2012 2:00 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> I know that the ARIN process can, on occasion be tricky to navigate if you don't
>> understand the subtleties of how some of the terminology is defined and that people
>> often use terms which have very specific meanings to ARIN staff members to have
>> a much broader meaning in what they are intending to say. I know that often leads
>> to misunderstandings which make the process even more difficult.
> 
> Yeah. Let's not forget that if you have 120 management devices (wifi backhaul/switches/waps) and a ton of customers with /32 assignments and you are renumbering from provider assigned space you gathered over many years into your own initial ARIN assignment, they want:
> 
> 1. equipment type and info for each management device
> 2. customer info for each /32 assignment
> 
> Tell me what ISP can legally and ethically give out their customer base information? Don't get me wrong. I'm sure small guys don't think twice about it, accumulating all the information and handing it over to ARIN thinking they have no choice (the responses from ARIN leaves one with that impression; you want the address space, you WILL give us this).
> 

There is nothing whatsoever wrong with providing the information to ARIN under NDA. ARIN provides a very good (IMHO) plain English mutual NDA for just this purpose.

What rational ethical ISP fails to include a provision for this process in their TOS?

> I sometimes wonder what happens to that information; if it sits around in an archive somewhere in the vast digital repositories of ARIN awaiting someone to steal it.

That's a very cynical view. I happen to know that ARIN takes the security of that data very seriously and I think they do a good job of protecting it. If you have any reason to believe otherwise, I invite you to offer some form of substantiation to support such a claim.

Owen