Re: 44/8

[Matthew Kaufman <matthew () matthew at>]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 1:36 PM John Curran <jcurran () arin net> wrote:

> On 22 Jul 2019, at 4:17 PM, Matthew Kaufman <matthew () matthew at> wrote:
>
> ...
>
>  That's why a real RIR for this space would have had a policy development
> process where *the community* could weigh in on ideas like "sell of 1/4 of
> it so we can have a big endowment". Which, heck, we might have all agreed
> to... if there was some transparency.
>
>
> Those are excellent questions for ADCR regarding its governance and
> accountability plans, but again, none of that requires any special “RIR”
> magic to accomplish; it simply takes a not-for-profit organization that
> serves its community – such entities are quite common but they require an
> active and engaged community and appropriate governance structures.
There's a bit of magic. If ARIN's board of directors decided to up and
start taking people's existing IPv4 allocations and selling them to Amazon
to beef up the ARIN scholarship fund, the recourse would include going to
IANA and noting that ARIN was no longer behaving as a responsible registrar
for the global community it serves.

Here the amateur radio community has noted that ARDC's board of directors
has decided to up and start taking people's existing IPv4 allocations
(including a /15 in use by the German amateur radio community) and selling
them to Amazon to beef up the ARDC grant fund (without engaging with the
global community of radio amateurs who thought that net 44 was being held
in trust for them, or engaging with even those entities/individuals who'd
already been allocated address space in the block). But because ARDC isn't
actually an IP address registrar of global IP space for its community as
delegated by IANA, we're left with grasping at ARIN for some accountability
here.

Matthew Kaufman