[External] Normal ARIN registration service fees for LRSA entrants after 31 Dec 2023

Fri Sep 16 18:53:25 UTC 2022

On Fri, Sep 16, 2022 at 11:21 AM Aaron Wendel
<aaron at wholesaleinternet.net> wrote:
> Is there a formal agreement that says that all legacy resources will
> receive free registry services forever and ever or is it just an
> informal "That's how it was done"?

Hi Aaron,

That is a... complicated... topic. To help illuminate it, I'm going to
rephrase the question.

Absent a contract between ARIN and an organization assigned IP
addresses prior to ARIN's existence (legacy registrant), what rights
does the legacy registrant have over the addresses and what rights
does ARIN have?

The original assignment process from representatives of the United
States government was woefully nonspecific about address recipients'
rights. During ARIN's formation, representations were made to the
government to the effect that ARIN would maintain the pre-existing
registrations without impairment. The agreement with the US government
which allowed ARIN to subsume address registry duties failed to speak
at all to the matter of rights retained by legacy registrants or
transferred to ARIN.

Every time the question has come up in court, the matter has ended
either with a determination that the part was not, in fact, the
registrant or with a negotiated settlement between the registrant an
ARIN.

So the bottom line is: we don't know what, if anything, ARIN is
legally required to do for the legacy registrants AND we don't know
what, if anything, ARIN is legally allowed to unilaterally do with
respect to the legacy registrations.

ARIN has its official theories and each of the legacy registrants have
theirs. For the past 25 years, ARIN has not elected to challenge the
legacy registrants in a manner substantive enough to require the
question to be resolved.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

--
For hire. https://bill.herrin.us/resume/