John,
I would hope that if some ARIN policy is enacted there would be
some way to differentiate between organizations, like the one I belong
to, that have provided this kind of service to customers for a number of
years and organizations looking to take advantage of the new scarcity.
We have and do provide IP space for other ISPs (mainly small and mid
size) despite not providing connectivity for a number of reasons. We
began providing this as a way of getting connectivity provider
independent space to ISPs that lacked their own ASN and usually were not
multi-homed because I had so many ISPs changing their upstream provider
that it was causing us issues in both our engineering and call center
teams. We provide network engineering (think re-IPing lots of ISP
networks) and end user technical support (think lots of calls from upset
customer who had to change their static IP) for many ISPs around the
country. We certainly don't have a huge allocation, we have 209 /24s
reassigned and 9 reallocated currently. We also pass along all of the
usage and reporting requirements that ARIN requires of us. We also
don't make money on the practice we charge a small amount on an annual
basis for record keeping. As I said, we started this mainly to prevent
network disruption and extra work _not_ as a profit center.
How a line might be drawn I don't know, but its important to
understand that there are very legitimate reasons to reassign or
reallocate space even if you are not providing connectivity for a given
network.
On 2/3/2011 11:54 AM, John Curran wrote:
On Feb 3, 2011, at 11:32 AM, Jon Lewis wrote:
My point being, the leasing of IP space to non-connectivity customers is
already well established, whether it's technically permitted by the
[ir]relevant RIRs. I fully expect this to continue and spread. Eventually,
holders of large legacy blocks will realize they can make good money acting as
an LIR, leasing portions of their unused space to people who need it and can't
get it, want it and don't qualify, etc.
These start-up LIRs won't be bound by RIR policies, both because in some cases
they'll be legacy space holders with no RSA with their region's RIR, and
because they won't be worried about eligibility for future RIR allocations of
v4 space...because there won't be any.
For the ARIN region, it would be nice to know how you'd like ARIN perform
in the presence of such activity ("leasing" IP addresses by ISP not providing
connectivity). It's possible that such is perfectly reasonable and to simply
be ignored, it's also possible that such should be considered a fraudulent
transfer and the resources reclaimed. At the end of the day, the policy is
set by this community, and clarity over ambiguity is very helpful.
Policy proposal process: https://www.arin.net/policy/pdp.html
Thanks!
/John
John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN
--
Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
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