On Fri, Sep 16, 2022 at 11:21 AM Aaron Wendel <aa...@wholesaleinternet.net> wrote: > Is there a formal agreement that says that all legacy resources will > receive free registry services forever and ever or is it just an > informal "That's how it was done"?
Hi Aaron, That is a... complicated... topic. To help illuminate it, I'm going to rephrase the question. Absent a contract between ARIN and an organization assigned IP addresses prior to ARIN's existence (legacy registrant), what rights does the legacy registrant have over the addresses and what rights does ARIN have? The original assignment process from representatives of the United States government was woefully nonspecific about address recipients' rights. During ARIN's formation, representations were made to the government to the effect that ARIN would maintain the pre-existing registrations without impairment. The agreement with the US government which allowed ARIN to subsume address registry duties failed to speak at all to the matter of rights retained by legacy registrants or transferred to ARIN. Every time the question has come up in court, the matter has ended either with a determination that the part was not, in fact, the registrant or with a negotiated settlement between the registrant an ARIN. So the bottom line is: we don't know what, if anything, ARIN is legally required to do for the legacy registrants AND we don't know what, if anything, ARIN is legally allowed to unilaterally do with respect to the legacy registrations. ARIN has its official theories and each of the legacy registrants have theirs. For the past 25 years, ARIN has not elected to challenge the legacy registrants in a manner substantive enough to require the question to be resolved. Regards, Bill Herrin -- For hire. https://bill.herrin.us/resume/
