600 acres and a mule, was Lightly used IP addresses

John Levine johnl at iecc.com
Sat Aug 14 04:00:19 UTC 2010


> And in complete fairness - why should folks who received vast tracts
> of addresses for little or no cost under a justified-need regime now
> have free reign to monetize their sale?

All of the real estate in my part of New York traces back to Military
Tract so and so.  In the 1790s the state allocated two million acres
on a justified-need basis, with the rule being that if you were a
Revolutionary War veteran, that justified you getting 600 acres, free.
You had to provide your own mule.

Once the lots were all handed out, in subsequent transfers, nobody
justified anything.  If you want to sell and I want to buy, that's
that and the county records it for a nominal clerical fee.  You will
doubtless find similar histories all over the country.  IPv4 space is
rapidly nearing the end of the homesteading era, and I suspect you're
going to have as much luck insisting that future transfers obey the
historic rules as my town would have had insisting that owners could
subdivide only if they were selling to other veterans.

To firm up my example of A selling to B a little, I was assuming there
was nothing wrong with B other than that ARIN wasn't satisfied with
the documentation they provided to show why they needed a /20.  Maybe
they're a startup, their VCs don't want them leaking their plans, and
don't see why anyone needs any justification other than the bill of
sale from A.  (Yes, I realize there's ways to finesse this particular
scenario.  It's an example.)  There's nothing hijacked here, the space
wasn't allocated to anyone other than A who for some reason, such as
loss of a customer, doesn't want it any more.

Are networks going to treat this the same as someone hijacking space
and hosting malware or sending fake drug spam?  Really?  From what I
can tell, unless a range is emitting actively annoying traffic,
there's no pushback about routing it at all.

R's,
John

PS: If you disagree, tell me about 130.105.0.0/16, which belongs to the
long defunct Open Software Foundation.










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