> On Aug 29, 2025, at 4:59 PM, Shawn Bakhtiar <[email protected]> wrote: > …. > As others have mentioned. ARIN is not LE (Law Enforcement), however, this > does not mean it can’t (and in fact it should) set policy. Once the policy is > established, then we can use it as a basis for enforcement, this could come > in the form of a civil law suite, etc...
Shawn - Alas, that is not the case - ARIN policy is used for operation of the number resource registry and does not equate to “public law”; i.e. you can’t engage law enforcement to complain about a violation of ARIN policy. > I can't go to courts and say hold someone to a standard that has not been > set. I need the policy, in order to establish the bad behavior. > > The difference in having this policy or not, is the difference on whether I > can pursue damages. Without it, the courts will simply say, they have no > obligation. With it the court can hold them to the obligation. A lot of different concepts are being conflated here - in order to pursue damages against a party, you’d need to show that they had some obligation to your organization – this isn’t even the case with ARIN policy, at best, resource holders have an obligation to _ARIN_ through their RSA to adhere to ARIN policy, and that’s not something that your organization can seek recourse for violation of… ARIN can, and would do so as specified by policy. > ARIN would never even be involved, netizens would simply litigate through the > civil courts. As noted above, that is not the case. If you want enforcement in the court system, then you need actual public law an applicable jurisdiction. > Again, I don't want to conflate enforcement with policy. All I'm asking for > here is a policy to be set (updated). I'm not asking ARIN to enforce it. The > community will do it through the normal legal and enforcement channels. But > we can't do that, when there is no policy to point to. Setting a policy in this area is fine (if the community wishes such), and there’s a range of things that ARIN can do with respect to enforcement that are short of resource revocation – if the community clearly specifies such actions. For example, it’s possible to publicly mark the registry records of those networks with abuse contacts found to be non-responsive (however “non-responsive" gets defined). It’s also possible to publish list of those networks which have nonresponsive abuse contacts, and therefore enable those who think that's a problem to filter accordingly. ARIN can also contact organizations – and would most certainly do so in the process of any material enforcement action (and hence there are costs involved to be considered with any policy and enforcement action.) However, to be clear - ARIN policy won’t provide you a cause of action to seek recourse in the courts (not unless the policy is made into public law or you have inserted compliance requirements in your contracts with other transit/peering providers and those happen to be the violators.) Thanks, /John John Curran President and CEO American Registry for Internet Numbers _______________________________________________ ARIN-PPML You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List ([email protected]). Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at: https://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml Please contact [email protected] if you experience any issues.
