PPML,

I agree with the intent of this proposal. However,  a rewording of the proposed 
language would make this proposal more palatable, especially if it addresses 
the concerns raised by staff, advisory council, and legal reviews.

--celeste.


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
Of ARIN
Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 7:59 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [arin-ppml] Draft Policy ARIN-2013-6: Allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 
Address Space to Out-of-region Requestors - Revised

Revised text for ARIN-2013-6 is below and can be found at:

https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2013_6.html

The AC will evaluate the discussion in order to assess the conformance of this 
draft policy with ARIN's Principles of Internet Number Resource Policy as 
stated in the PDP. Specifically, these principles are:

  * Enabling Fair and Impartial Number Resource Administration

  * Technically Sound

  * Supported by the Community

The ARIN Policy Development Process (PDP) can be found at:

https://www.arin.net/policy/pdp.html

Draft Policies and Proposals under discussion can be found at:

https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/index.html

Regards,

Communications and Member Services
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)


## * ##


Draft Policy ARIN-2013-6
Allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 Address Space to Out-of-region Requestors

Date: 25 September 2013

Problem Statement:

ARIN number resources should be used primarily in the ARIN region, for ARIN 
region organizations. There is currently no explicit policy guiding staff in 
this area, this proposal seeks to correct that.

Policy Statement:

Create new policy Section X.

X. Resource Justification within ARIN Region

Organizations requesting Internet number resources from ARIN must provide proof 
that they (1) are an active business entity legally operating within the ARIN 
service region, and (2) are operating a network located within the ARIN service 
region. In addition to meeting all other applicable policy requirements, a 
plurality of new resources requested from ARIN must be justified by technical 
infrastructure or customers located within the ARIN service region, and any 
located outside the region must be interconnected to the ARIN service region.
The same technical infrastructure or customers cannot be used to justify 
resources in more than one RIR.

Authors Comments:

Although we represent law enforcement, and have brought forth this issue based 
upon our concerns and experience from a law enforcement perspective, this is a 
problem in which the entire ARIN community has a stake.

As reported at the last meeting in Barbados, ARIN staff is having difficulty 
verifying organizations out-of-region. In many of the cases, particularly in 
VPS (Virtual Private Service), the only information received on these 
organizations by ARIN is a customer name and IP address. This information 
cannot be properly verified by ARIN. Accuracy of registration data is critical 
to not only law enforcement, but the greater ARIN community as it relates to 
abuse contact and complaints. In fact, most issues facing law enforcement are 
also shared by legitimate companies attempting, for instance, to identify an 
organization that has hijacked their IP address space.

The expedited depletion of IPv4 address space in the ARIN region certainly 
seems to negatively impact those organizations currently operating in the 
region that may need to return to ARIN for additional
IPv4 address space. While law enforcement’s concern is that criminal 
organizations outside of the ARIN region can easily and quickly request large 
blocks of IPv4 address space from ARIN, organizations that are not truly global 
organizations, but specific national companies from the RIPE and APNIC regions, 
also have this capability which is detrimental to true ARIN region 
organizations.

This policy proposal is re-enforcing practices the ARIN staff currently employs 
to ensure that ARIN IP space is used for and by companies that are legitimate 
and have a legitimate presence in the ARIN region. This policy will assist in 
defining clear criteria that will be helpful to ARIN staff and the community.

The primary role of RIRs is to manage and distribute public Internet address 
space within their respective regions. The problem brought forth here clearly 
undermines the current RIR model; if any organization can acquire IP address 
space from any region, what then is the purpose of the geographical breakdown 
of the five RIRs?

Advisory Council Comments:

The term "Internet number resources" or more simply "resources" should be used 
instead of "IP Blocks" to more accurately reflect the totality of the Registry. 
This implies both IPv4 and IPv6, as well as ASNs.

While Internet registries are organized on a regional basis, policy must 
recognize that many networks, services and operations are trans-regional and it 
would be burdensome and impractical to attempt to strictly enforce 
territorially exclusive allocations. Therefore, policy should seek to balance 
the regional structure of address allocation with flexibility of service 
provision, by ensuring that ARIN's resources are primarily aligned with the 
ARIN service region but facilitate flexibility and efficiency of use by 
applicants from any region.

There are concerns that out of region organizations should be able to request 
resources for use within the ARIN service region. The proposed text 
accommodates this issue by requiring only proof that an organization is 
"legally operating within the ARIN Service Region". This includes business 
entities formed in the region, or other business entities with legal branch 
offices within the region. So, as long as an out of region organization is 
"legally operating within the ARIN Service Region" they can request resources 
from ARIN.

Current operational practice is to require an organization be formed within the 
ARIN service region. However, if this were applied by all the RIRs, a global 
network would be required to have a minimum of five subsidiaries, one formed in 
each of the five RIR regions, this seems overly burdensome. Good resource 
policy should consider the consequences of all RIRs adopting the same policy.

Previous discussions of the topic indicated that it is difficult to enforce and 
undesirable for many in the community to dictate where resources are to be used 
once they are allocated. A strategy to deal with this is to focus the policy on 
the technical infrastructure and customers used to justify the requested number 
resources from ARIN, as opposed to where resources are actually used once 
allocated. This is a subtle but important distinction.

While resources received from ARIN may be used outside the ARIN region, a 
common technical infrastructure must interconnect the use of these resources to 
the ARIN region. This provides a necessary nexus with the ARIN service region 
for such out of region use. Therefore, if a discrete network is operating 
within another region, not interconnected to the ARIN region, then resources 
for that discrete network should be requested from that region's RIR.

A concern was raised that this policy shouldn't limit or interfere with 
outbound inter-RIR transfers. If we focus on what justifies a request for 
resources from ARIN, outbound inter-RIR transfers shouldn't be affected, as 
they are clearly based on the receiving RIR's policies.

 From previous discussions of the topic, "double dipping" should not be 
allowed, that is using the same technical infrastructure or customers to 
justify resources from ARIN and another RIR at the same time.

The legal jurisdiction an organization is formed in doesn't necessarily reflect 
the jurisdictions in which it operates, or even that it operates a network in a 
jurisdiction. This implies that we should have both technical and legal 
requirements regarding operating within the ARIN service region in order to 
receive resources.

This policy is not intended to have any retroactive effect. It should not be 
construed to effect or invalidate any assignment or allocation previously made 
by ARIN, one of its predecessor registries, or any ISP or other LIR, based on 
good faith application information. In particular direct assignments previously 
made to individuals are not invalidated by this policy. However, this policy is 
intended to disallow any new assignment or allocation made directly to an 
individual person, consistent with current operational practice.

The original text used the term "majority", seeming to describe a "simple," 
"absolute" or "overall" majority, which means greater than 50%. Many 
organizations don't have greater than 50% of their users or customers in any 
one region. A "plurality", "relative majority", "largest of", or more 
specifically "more than any other RIR's service region" seems to be the 
intended and appropriate meaning of the term "majority" in this context. Let's 
clarify that intent by using the term "plurality".

The intent is not to require an organization to have an overall plurality of 
its technical infrastructure and customers within the ARIN service region. 
Rather, it is to ensure that the plurality of currently requested resources is 
justified from within the ARIN region. If an organization¹s primary, or 
largest, demand for resources is in another region then the organization should 
request resources from that region's RIR, at least for the demand within that 
other RIR's region. Further, it is not intended to limit access to resources 
intended to be exclusively used within the ARIN region.


##########


ARIN Staff and Legal Assessment of the earlier, 4 September 2013, version of 
the draft

DRAFT NUMBER AND NAME: Draft Policy ARIN-2013-6 Allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 
Address Space to Out-of-region Requestors

DATE: 18 September 2013

1. Summary (Staff Understanding)

This policy would require requesters to provide proof of legal presence within 
the ARIN region and to demonstrate that a majority (or plurality) of their 
technical infrastructure and customers are within the ARIN region in order to 
qualify and receive IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

2. Comments

A. ARIN Staff Comments

· This proposal would predominantly formalize ARIN's existing practice with 
respect to requiring the requestor to have a legal presence in the ARIN region 
and to operate a network in region. However, the proposal would also create new 
practice and processes via inclusion of the statement "a plurality of resources 
requested from ARIN must be justified by technical infrastructure and customers 
located within the ARIN service region, and any located outside the region must 
be interconnected to the ARIN service region."

· This could create a scenario where a network can't get IPv4/IPv6 addresses 
from any RIR. For example, suppose a large network operator from another region 
wants to establish a presence at a datacenter in Miami. That other regional 
registry may decline to issue IP addresses for use in the ARIN region, but the 
requester would also be unable to get IP addresses from ARIN since a majority 
of their technical infrastructure and customers are located outside the ARIN 
region.

· It's unclear how the location of hosted customers is defined. If a customer 
resides or operates outside of ARIN’s region, but leases a dedicated server in 
Los Angeles, is the customer considered to be within the ARIN region since the 
hardware they're controlling is within the ARIN region, or are they considered 
to be outside the region since they reside elsewhere? How about a colocation 
situation where a customer who resides out of region ships a server to Los 
Angeles? Does the presence of a customer's hardware in the region make them 
in-region?

· The phrase "a majority of their technical infrastructure and customers are 
within the ARIN region" could be read that technical infrastructure and 
customers should be evaluated together as one pool. That could be problematic. 
Consider a hosting provider whose technical infrastructure is 100% within the 
ARIN region. 5% of their customers are located within the ARIN region (assuming 
"resides within the ARIN region" constitutes in-region). Does that mean a 
majority of their technical infrastructure and customers are located within the 
region since when you consider them in total, the majority is in-region? If the 
intent is to require that the majority of both be in-region, the phrasing 
should be something like "a majority of both their technical infrastructure and 
customers" to indicate each item is being evaluated independently.

· Text says, "...and any located outside the region must be interconnected to 
the ARIN service region." This statement is unclear. 
Is the intent that discrete networks overseas cannot obtain space from ARIN? (A 
discrete network meaning a different autonomous system number)

· There are potential implications with respect to IPv6 and proposed policy 
text; in particular, does the community want an organization to be able to get 
all space from one RIR when it comes to IPv6? If you are a multinational, and 
get a huge block from ARIN, and years from now your overseas division has grown 
and you need more space, you have to go another RIR serving that region?

· Staff notes that policy text would be inserted into NRPM section 2.2.

B. ARIN General Counsel - Legal Assessment

The current draft seeks to fill an important gap in ARIN’s policies; more 
specifically, policy guidance that clearly describes the degree to which a 
proposed recipient of number resources from ARIN has to have real installations 
and customers in the ARIN region.

 From a legal standpoint, there are two possible spectrum points of policy to 
avoid: first, having inadequate policy guidance would leave policy 
implementation subject to a high degree of staff interpretation; and at the 
other end, adopting an overly prescriptive guidance or standard that fails to 
permit multinational business entities to obtain number resources that are 
needed both in the ARIN region and outside of the ARIN region from ARIN. Both 
extremes are unattractive for a standard setting organization such as ARIN.

In particular, the current text:

**** ‘plurality of resources requested from ARIN must be justified by technical 
infrastructure and customers located within the ARIN service region’ ****

should be carefully evaluated, as it sets the policy requirement of ‘plurality’ 
that may prove unnecessarily restrictive in some cases. A lower standard is 
recommended to avoid otherwise valid requesters for address resources from 
being precluded from obtaining number resources.

Note that policy language which provides for reasonable restrictions (e.g. 
requiring more than a fictitious or tenuous and limited presence for the 
recipient to receive the resources in this region and/or clear intention to 
make use of some of the resources within the region) can be adopted without 
creating serious legal risk.

3. Resource Impact

This policy would have minimal resource impact from an implementation aspect. 
It is estimated that implementation would occur within 3 months after 
ratification by the ARIN Board of Trustees. The following would be needed in 
order to implement:

A. Updated guidelines

B. Staff training
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