[governance] US v John Doe & Others [#RIRs #Botnets #IP Addresses #extraterritorial jurisdictional application]

[John Curran]

On Nov 28, 2011, at 12:21 AM, Louis Pouzin (well) wrote:

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 20:04, Salanieta T. Tamanikaiwaimaro <salanieta.tamanikaiwaimaro at gmail.com<mailto:salanieta.tamanikaiwaimaro at gmail.com>> wrote:

Are IP addresses property or public resources?
- - -

It seems that the establishment has already made its mind.

see Milton's pieces:
http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2011/3/23/4778509.html
http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2011/4/16/4797025.html

"Nortel, in bankruptcy, sells IPv4 address block for $7.5 million" .. to Microsoft

To be very clear, Nortel did transfer its rights of certain address
registrations to Microsoft.  Rights can indeed be treated as an
asset of an estate (e.g. airspace rights, mining rights, license
rights) but that does not mean that the underlying item is a form
of "free and clear" property, only that something (often limited in
nature) has been transferred.

The original sale order would have transferred Nortel's rights and
interests free and clear to Microsoft.  ARIN filed an objection with
the court, and the parties were able to work out an amended sale
and court order which was satisfactory.  The parties (Nortel and
Microsoft) jointed submitted a revised sales order that said the
addresses "will be placed under a registration services agreement
(LRSA) between ARIN and Microsoft", and draft court order that
read "For avoidance of doubt, this Order shall not affect the LRSA
and Purchaser's rights in Internet Numbers transferred pursuant to
this Order shall be subject to the  terms of the LRSA".  Microsoft
entered into an RSA (Registration Services Agreement) with ARIN,
which delineated the rights applicable to their use of the resource.

This information has been provided to Mr. Mueller, but followup
does not appear sufficiently newsworthy for any further coverage
so as to leave the readers with an accurate record of the events.

A balanced summary on the matter might read:  the "establishment"
has not made up its mind (i.e. there is not yet a fully litigated and
appealed final judgement establishing case law), but in this case has
decided that it was in all parties interests to deal only with those rights
that the Internet number registry system (in this case ARIN) indicated
were available to the address holder.

Nortel sold something they never paid for, to which they added no value, and used to their advantage.

All correct, but that is looking at a single tree rather than the forest.

We face an interesting challenge, in that significant amounts of
potentially available IPv4 address space in is the present system
due to underutilization of existing assignments. Some of these are
assignments from the early days of the Internet, and some are more
recent (such as those sitting in various consolidated firms after the
2002 Internet/telecom bubble burst.)   We are now at a point in time
due to IPv4 runout of the central free pool where the ability for service
providers to make use of that space would be very useful, as some
providers may need some additional time to plan and implement their
transition to IPv6.  At a high level, the options available to the Internet
community to make this underutilized space available is reclamation
or a market mechanism.   As appealing as the prospect of reclamation
and reissuance appears, implementation would be very problematic
due to the legal issues, potential for inadvertent harm, and determining
equitable assignment policies where demand greatly exceeds supply.
The community in the ARIN region opted instead for a limited market
which provides an incentive for underutilized address space to come
back into the system, while still respecting the rights of the community
via policies over transfer (e.g. to mitigate the potential impact to the
global routing tables.)   It is not a perfect system, but one that
accomplishes the goal with a minimal amount of self-regulation.

FYI,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN





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