ARIN IP6 policy for those with legacy IP4 Space

Fri Apr 9 13:14:15 UTC 2010

On Apr 9, 2010, at 8:27 AM, Joe Greco wrote:

> 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.

Correct (ARIN is the successor registry)

> 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.

ARIN has a budget which includes legal reserves for contingencies
such as these, but would need to have a clear direction supported
by the community before taking any action in this area.

> 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."

Alas, Joe, ARIN will follow the policies directed by the community with
respect to service provided to legacy address holders, and invites you
to participate in that community to help establish those policies.  If
the community directs ARIN to provide some set of services to legacy
address holders for free, or on a cost recovery, or whatever, ARIN will
comply.  You may not have realized it when you received your address
allocation, but you were implicitly joining a community which includes
the IAB/IETF, IANA, and ARIN, and opting to ignore that community does
not necessarily mean you won't be affected by its policies.

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN