ARIN Comment

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

On Tuesday, 29 June, I assigned the ARIN General Counsel the task to review
and prepare the necessary filings to either intervene formally or as an
amicus in the case filed in the Superior Court of New Jersey Chancery
Division for Morris County No: MRSC-87-04. ARIN's interest in reviewing
this dispute was two fold:

a. Determine whether the global and regional policies regarding the use of
Internet Numbering Resources have been violated; and

b. Determine whether the Registration Service Agreements which both the
Plaintiff and the Defendant have signed with ARIN have been violated.

The pleadings in this case have been carefully reviewed by the ARIN General
Counsel. As a result of that review we have preliminarily determined that
neither the policies nor Registration Service Agreements have been violated.
Therefore we have concluded that it is not appropriate for ARIN to intervene
formally or as an amicus in this case.

The parties to the dispute are the Plaintiff, a company known as University
Communications dba Pegasus Web Technologies, which provides web hosting and
internet access services to customers, and its principal; and the Defendant,
Net Access Corporation, an ISP that supplied number resources, obtained from
ARIN, to the Plaintiff.

ARIN has no interest in the 'who shot John' allegations between Plaintiff
and Defendant regarding claims of breach of contract, breach of duty of good
faith and fair dealing, and etc.

Stripped to its essence, it is clear that Plaintiff no longer wants to do
business in the long run with Defendant, and appears to be following ARIN
and Internet customary procedures to renumber client accounts in a manner
that will permit its internet customers to seamlessly continue their use of
the Internet, whether the number used was originally issued to the
Defendant, then provided to the specific member of the public by the
Plaintiff, or is now being renumbered by the Plaintiff.

It does take time to renumber, and it appears the real issue in this suit is
Plaintiff's attempt to obtain from the Court what it believes is sufficient
time to accomplish this task. We express no opinion whether the Plaintiff
might have moved faster in this regard and avoided this dispute, because
those facts are not fully known to us. We have carefully reviewed the
arguments provided and do not believe the arguments by the Plaintiff sought
any relief inconstant with obtaining time to renumber, consistent with
ARIN's and the Internet community's normal expectations. That is also the
overall thrust of the Order to Show Cause With Temporary Restraints issued
by the Court.

There is language in that Order that if taken out of context of the
arguments and spirit of the Order might have raised some concern. For
example the Order does not clearly expire in several months consistent with
the requested time to renumber. However, we have concluded it is not a
problem when read in context and ARIN can at any point raise in any Court
its objection to an open ended requirement that numbers supplied by business
A to business B must be maintained in perpetuity and not renumbered.

Therefore, we have concluded that the recent intense discussion was fueled
by a characterization of the litigation by one of the parties in a manner
that was intended to and did raise community concerns, that we do not agree
are implicated at this time. We will continue to monitor this and other
litigation that might genuinely raise these concerns, and will alert the
community to such cases when we find them so courts can be educated about
these policies.

Raymond A. Plzak
President & CEO
ARIN

2

Thank you!

I was also concerned, until I read the actual pleadings.

Although nobody's ever allowed us (AS19933) more than 1 month to
renumber, and we've always had to pay both providers during the time,
so we've always kept it as short as possible anyway....

We look forward to yet another partial renumber again next month as
we change one of our upstreams. Just another cost of keeping the
market competitive. :frowning: If nobody actually follows through on changing, there's no incentive to offer competetive rates....

3

But now you can get PI space and take well over a year to renumber into it without fear of ARIN asking for it back.

NAC may not have posted the whole proceeding at first, but Alex was very clear he wanted commentary only on the allocation policies. Some of us (me included) took it a bit farther. Now it is clear from ARIN - who is supposedly in charge of this stuff in "America" - that nothing is wrong with taking months after your contract expires to number out of PA space, and over a year to renumber into PI space once it is granted. So I guess commentary is no longer needed (except maybe at ARIN meetings?).

The first is somewhat customary but by no means universally practiced. Now it seems to be officially sanctioned. I was under the obviously incorrect impression the latter was against ARIN policy.

Glad we have official clarification.

4

I think it is important to note that different applications have different
time requirements for renumbering. Cable modem customers on DHCP could
renumbered as quickly as your lease time. Routers can be renumbered with a
couple of conf t statements. Hosting you directly control can be
renumbered with sed and/or some quick perl scripts.

But have you ever tried renumbering thousands of web hosting IPs used by
hundreds of clueless wannabe point and click sysadmins using cpanel? Just
remmeber that almost every one of those hoster customers probably has
customers of their own, with hundreds of domains and DNS managed by god
only knows what interface, not to mention poorly written embedded perl and
php scripts, and oh did I mention cpanel?

It is a really poor assumption to think that just because it takes someone
like this a year to renumber space, that they must be lazy or stupid or
doing something horribly wrong themselves. I can't tell you for sure that
it isn't that case here, but I CAN tell you for sure that I have seen
similar lead times to renumber blocks from otherwise very hard working and
intelligent folks in this business. We all complain when some piece of
ARIN policy which doesn't fit our business model affects us negatively, I
don't see why web hosting folks deserve any less consideration.

5

> I was also concerned, until I read the actual pleadings.
>
> Although nobody's ever allowed us (AS19933) more than 1 month to
> renumber, and we've always had to pay both providers during the time,
> so we've always kept it as short as possible anyway....

But now you can get PI space and take well over a year to renumber into
it without fear of ARIN asking for it back.

  This is an example of a gross generalization, assuming that what held true
in one case will be true in every case. First of all, we hav eno idea
whether ARIN will ask for it back or not. This case had nothing to do with
ARIN. This case was a dispute between a service provider and their customer
and had nothing at all to do with the enforcement of ARIN policies.

NAC may not have posted the whole proceeding at first, but Alex was
very clear he wanted commentary only on the allocation policies. Some
of us (me included) took it a bit farther. Now it is clear from ARIN -
who is supposedly in charge of this stuff in "America" - that nothing
is wrong with taking months after your contract expires to number out
of PA space, and over a year to renumber into PI space once it is
granted. So I guess commentary is no longer needed (except maybe at
ARIN meetings?).

  Huh? ARIN offered no opinion that I saw on whether the renumbering was
acceptable or not. ARIN is not a party to this dispute and only looked into
it because of the fear that this might be a case where a judge tried to
convert NP space into portable space. Since it seems rather clear that this
is *not* what is happening in this case, ARIN decided nothing needed to be
done.

  Look, Alex only wanted commentary on the allocation policies, but ARIN
commented on the facts of this specific case. Now you're acting as if ARIN
commented only on the allocation policies. This is just not the case. ARIN
responded to the precise facts of this specific issue and did not state any
general principle. They don't have to -- the general principles are in their
policies.

The first is somewhat customary but by no means universally practiced.
Now it seems to be officially sanctioned. I was under the obviously
incorrect impression the latter was against ARIN policy.

  Again, ARIN commented only on this specific case and concluded that the TRO
did not relate to a violation of ARIN policy. In fact, the TRO has nothing
to do with the fact that the customer has PI space and hasn't renumbered
into it. It has to do with the use of the NP space, and to my knowledge, the
way NP space is being used in the case is not at all out of the ordinary.

Glad we have official clarification.

  We have official clarification only about how ARIN feels about how the NP
space is being used in this particular case.

  DS

6

Perhaps there is a message here that ARIN might pick up on some of the work done in the IETF PIER WG. This did produce RFC 2071 on why one wants to renumber (coauthored with Paul Ferguson) and RFC 2072 (my Router Renumbering Guide). At the time, no one in the WG really wanted to go after the application renumbering issues.

I can barely spell HTML -- I'm just trying to get a basic webpage. Clearly, I am not the right person to spearhead an effort, but either ARIN, or perhaps the RIRs acting as a team, might do well to put out additional guidance on renumbering. After such guidance has been available for some time, the RIRs might reexamine their policies and see if what evolves as Best Current Practice should enter the policies.

Is there active work on RFC 2050 bis? I haven't heard anything in a while.

AFAIK, there's been no activity in ARIN CLEW for some time.

7

If you think a little - having hundreds of web services, it is reasonable
_do not renumber_. Of course, it will require extra efforts when getting IP
block(s) or require do not change main provider(s).