Re: 44/8

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

> On Jul 22, 2019, at 14:03 , John Curran <jcurran () arin net> wrote:
>
> On 22 Jul 2019, at 4:44 PM, Matthew Kaufman <matthew () matthew at> wrote:
> > ...
> > 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.
>
> Hmm – a rather interesting thought exercise.   Rather than belabor the point, I shall simply suggest that in such 
> circumstances you might find yourself far better making use of mechanisms available both in the ARIN bylaws (and 
> under Virginia state law for a non-stock membership organization) to address such a matter, but that’s based on my 
> perhaps imperfect knowledge of the situation... 
>
> > 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.
>
>
> It is both touching (and somewhat disquieting) that you view the RIR system being the only available source of 
> community accountability, but it is not correct – ARDC has significant obligations as non-profit public benefit 
> corporation in order to remain a valid legal entity.   I imagine that there is now significantly more engagement 
> between the amateur radio community and that organization, and one hopes it can be positively directed to further 
> digital communication by the amateur radio community. 

Perhaps, but as I understand it:

        1.      ARDC cannot undo the transaction.
        2.      Even if ARDC is forced into non-existence, that does not restore the resources to the Amateur Radio 
Community.
        3.      Eliminating ARDC at this point only makes the future of those funds even less likely to serve any valid 
Amateur Radio Purpose.

Thus, ARIN, which runs the registry and does have the ability to invalidate the transaction for fraud upon realizing 
that ARDC really didn’t have the backing of the community in it’s claim of ownership of the block and the coincidence 
of the contacts deciding to turn this into a structure they could enrich (and possibly draw a salary from, though I do 
not know if that is anyone’s intent), and knowing just how to move it through the ARIN process through a rather long 
game still constitutes a fraudulent misappropriation of the resources in question vs. the community interest in said 
resources.

Owen