Proof of ownership; when someone demands you remove a prefix

Tue Mar 13 18:20:39 UTC 2018

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 1:38 PM, Sean Pedersen
<spedersen.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is more or less the situation we're in. We contacted the customer and they informed us the matter is in dispute with the RIR and that their customer (the assignee) is in the process of resolving the issue. We have to allow them time to accomplish this. I've asked for additional information to help us understand the nature of the dispute. In that time we received another request to stop announcing the prefix(s) in addition to a new set of prefixes, and a threat to contact our upstream providers as well as ARIN - which is not the RIR the disputed resources are allocated to.

Sean,

If you've been announcing the route for the past year before this
complaint came in then you are, of course, correct. It would be
unconscionable to suddenly cut a customer over a paperwork problem.

> This is a new(er) customer, so there is some merit to dropping the prefix and letting them sort it out based on the current RIR contact(s). However, there is obvious concern over customer service and dropping such a large block of IPs.

If you've been announcing the route for the past week before this
complaint came in then you are causing someone else a big operational
headache. You must stop. Insist that the customer straighten out their
problem with the RIR before you announce the route.

You can ignore the threat to contact ARIN. ARIN does not involve
itself in routing disputes. Your upstream (and their upstream, et
cetera) will act to preserve their reputations. If that includes
manually blocking some of your announcements, you'll have a devil of a
time undoing it later.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>