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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: [Fwd: Kremen VS Arin Antitrust Lawsuit - Anyone have feedback?]
The complaint was, at best, an entertaining read. IANAL. As was mentioned earlier, it looks like Kremen's whole case is built on a number of false assumptions: 1. Netblocks are the property of the organization once their assignment request is approved by ARIN or other RIR. Since this is false, the none of the parties involved in Kremen v. Cohen would have legal standing to make the transfer of Cohen's netblocks a condition of satisfying the judgment in that case. 2. There is an open market for buying and selling IP addresses. While ISPs can and sometimes do charge fees to their customers to use a block of PA space, they cannot do the same on an 'open' market. The customer normally may use the PA space until their business relationship with the ISP is terminated, i.e. the space is non-portable. 3. ARIN's policies discriminate against smaller providers by preventing them from getting larger netblocks. Going back to 1997 from what I can find, ARIN's address assignment policies have always advocated a pay-as-you-go model. If an organization gets close to using all of their assigned addresses, they can request another block once they've provided justification that the first assignment has been efficiently used. The complaint acknowledges that IP addresses are finite resources and that macro-allocation of address ranges is handled by ICANN. 4. "Recently... Classless Inter-Domain Routing or CIDR..." As others have mentioned, this is hilarious. I guess I'll have to upgrade my routers to use that newfangled routing protocol, BGP4.... CIDR had a huge impact in putting the brakes on wasteful IP address allocation. The days of /16s being available pretty much for the asking are long gone. 5. Providing information to justify an assignment or transfer request will force the requestor to reveal information that is confidential and proprietary. The way I see it, this helps maintain some degree of transparency of ARIN's policies, customer business names and addresses are items that are probably already matters of public record from domain name registrations and so forth. Also, the information provided to ARIN when requesting more space is normally more detailed than what is required to be made public through SWIP or RWHOIS. The information specifically submitted to ARIN for proving a request is justified is not released to the public. jms
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