Can a customer take IP's with them?

David Schwartz davids at webmaster.com
Thu Jun 24 01:40:06 UTC 2004



> a TRO against nacs.net has no effect on the behavior of providers
> such as verio who won't honor the advertisement of the subnet
> in BGP. the customer would have to, one-by-one i think, go after
> everybody with the relatively common policy of ignoring such
> advertisements (isn't sprint one of these? that'd be a pretty big
> hunk of internet to be disconnected from. sprint having no
> contractual relationship with the idiot, er, customer in question,
> it'd be hard for the customer to get anywhere there.)
>
> in other words, by itself the requested TRO incompletely solves
> the problem, making it fairly pointless.

	We don't know enough about the specifics to know if this argument works or
not. There are two obvious cases where it doesn't:

	1) The block in question is large enough (or located in legacy space) such
that most/all providers will listen to it anyway.

	2) The customer's new provider meets with their old provider directly and
the new block is inside a larger block the original provider will continue
to advertise. (This is a very common case if both providers are large.)

	It's worth pointing out, however, that if case 2 applies and case 1
doesn't, then the ISP will still be providing a level of actual packet
carrying service to the customer. It is grossly unfair to expect a provider
to do this for free, assuming they didn't do something equally unfair to the
customer. Which is why it will really come down to the merits of the actual
dispute between the customer and the ISP.

	The TRO is an interesting sideshow, but really in the scheme of things not
a particulary big deal. Remember, to get a TRO you must show that you
(likely) deserve it equitably, otherwise the hardship issue doesn't come
into play. It is, however, a good warning for ISPs. Make sure your contracts
with your customers stipulate that IP assignments are to follow ARIN's
published policies and that they may be revoked by you or ARIN for
non-compliance with standard practices. Also clearly state what your
renumbering policies and advertisement by other provider policies are.
What's obvious to you may not be obvious to your customers and you can't
expect to be assured of being able to enforce your contracts with ARIN on
your customers.

	DS





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