[Fwd: Kremen VS Arin Antitrust Lawsuit - Anyone have feedback?]

Mon Sep 11 18:45:58 UTC 2006

Joe makes a good point. Everyone is shouting "no one owns IP addresses", but
that is proof by assertion. Yelling louder doesn't make it so. Neither does
ARIN's assertions or their policies. What would establish IP addresses as
some sort of ARIN-owned and licensed community property? Well, winning a
court case like this, or congress passing a law. Frankly, those who want
ARIN's ownership of IP addresses to be established, should hope Kremens put
on a good case here, to establish a nice solid precedent. 

Who cares about when CIDR came out? It was background information and not
really material to the case. 

Kremens was the victim of a very nasty fraud. People are acting like he's a
bad guy, when, in fact, he was a victim of one of the worst cases of domain
hijacking, and his original case is one that we rely on for protection
today. 

There is a strong argument to be made for ownership of IP addressing and
subsequently trading address space as a commodity, with ARIN as a commodity
exchange and clearinghouse. 

Is this reaction people hating lawyers more than ARIN, or what?

- Daniel Golding

  _____  

From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of joe
mcguckin
Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 1:37 PM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Kremen VS Arin Antitrust Lawsuit - Anyone have feedback?]

I read the complaint. I don't like the fact that a lot of my friends are
named in the suit, but I think there are some

points worth discussing within the community:

1) IP address blocks are not 'property'

"Domains are not property. The assignee of a domain has no ownership
interest"

Network Solutions made this same argument years ago. That was their shield
against lawsuits when negligence

(or worse) on NetSols part would cause a domain to be erroneously
transferred. When mistakes were made,

Network Solutions was notoriously unwilling to reverse the transaction to
correct the error.

Then they got sued for refusing to reverse a fradulent domain transfer, and
they lost. The case had the side effect of setting 

the precedent that domains *are* in fact tangible property. Now when a
registrar or registry makes a mistake, they can be 

legally held responsible. (What case was that? Kremen v. Network Solutions)

I would say that's an improvement.

2) Why does ARIN believe that it can ignore a court order?

3) What's wrong with treating assignments like property and setting up a
market to buy and sell them? There's plenty of precedent for this:

Mineral rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum. 

If a given commodity is truly scarce, nothing works as good as the free
market in encouraging consumers to conserve and make the best 

use of it.

Joe McGuckin

ViaNet Communications

joe at via.net

650-207-0372 cell

650-213-1302 office

650-969-2124 fax

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20060911/bfe64255/attachment.html>