ARIN IP6 policy for those with legacy IP4 Space

Fri Apr 9 12:27:28 UTC 2010

[context restored]
> > > If you don't have a contract with ARIN, why should ARIN provide
> > > you with anything?

> > [I replied]
> > Because a legacy holder doesn't care about ARIN
> 
> i do not think that statement is defensible
> 
> there is a difference between caring and being willing to give up rights
> for no benefit

I meant in the context of an answer to the question above.  A legacy
holder doesn't really care _who_ is currently providing the services
that InterNIC once provided.  It doesn't matter to me if our legacy
space is currently "handled" by ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, ICANN, or whatever.

Put less tersely:

We were assigned space, under a policy whose purpose was primarily to
guarantee uniqueness in IPv4 numbering.  As with other legacy holders,
we obtained portable space to avoid the technical problems associated
with renumbering, problems with in-addr.arpa subdelegation, etc.

Part of that was an understanding that the space was ours (let's not
get distracted by any "ownership" debate, but just agree for the sake
of this point that it was definitely understood that we'd possess it).
This served the good of the Internet by promoting stability within an
AS and allowed us to spend engineering time on finer points (such as 
maintaining PTR's) rather than renumbering gear every time we changed
upstreams.

Eventually InterNIC was disbanded, and components went in various
directions.  ARIN landed the numbering assignment portion of InterNIC.
Along with that, maintenance of the legacy resources drifted along to
ARIN.

ARIN might not have a contract with us, or with other legacy holders.
It wasn't our choice for ARIN to be tasked with holding up InterNIC's
end of things.  However, it's likely that they've concluded that they
better do so, because if they don't, it'll probably turn into a costly
legal battle on many fronts, and I doubt ARIN has the budget for that.

As a legacy holder, we don't really care who is currently "responsible"
for legacy maintenance/etc.  However, whoever it is, if they're not
going to take on those responsibilities, that's a problem.

The previous poster asked, "If you don't have a contract with ARIN, 
why should ARIN provide you with anything?"

Well, the flip side to that is, "ARIN doesn't have a contract with us,
but we still have copies of the InterNIC policies under which we were
assigned space, and ARIN undertook those duties, so ARIN is actually 
the one with significant worries if they were to try to pull anything,
otherwise, we don't really care."

Is that a suitable defense of that statement (which might not have
been saying quite what you thought)?

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.