On Mon, Jul 25, 2022 at 1:28 PM Ronald F. Guilmette <[email protected]> wrote: > Anybody can claim anything in court. [...] > I personally believe that ARIN has no legally enforcable obligations to > any party that it has no explicit contract with.
Hi Ronald, If two parties have a contract with each other (let's say you and your Internet provider) and a third party does something unreasonable which obstructs the performance of that contract, the third party has broken the law. It's called "tortious interference with a contract." Now, suppose you receive a grant of IP addresses from the U.S. Government via its contractors operating as the InterNIC. I.e. legacy addresses. You ask your ISP to route those addresses on the Internet but when the ISP checks the registry ARIN says, "No, we reclaimed those numbers and assigned them to party X." ARIN, a third party not involved in the contract, has clearly done something which obstructs the performance of the contract between you and your ISP. The only question is whether it's reasonable. To answer the reasonableness question you have to inquire into the source of ARIN's authority to reclaim those numbers and assign them to someone else. If ARIN has a contract with you covering the numbers then that's the source of ARIN's authority. If they don't then you have to rewind 25 years and look at how ARIN came to manage the registry. That gets murky but the bottom line is there's no clear grant of authority for ARIN to make unilateral changes to legacy database while there is a clear assignment of responsibility to indefinitely operate that database as a condition of taking over the InterNIC function from the U.S. government. Bear in mind, once you've demonstrated that ARIN interfered, the onus is on ARIN to demonstrate that the interference was reasonable. If they can't, ARIN is both liable for damages and subject to injunctions. And that's just one of the bits of law at play here. So there are almost certainly legally enforceable obligations upon ARIN regarding the legacy registrants, even without a contract. Exactly what those obligations are is harder to say. You'd have to toss the dice and go to court to find out. Regards, Bill Herrin -- For hire. https://bill.herrin.us/resume/ _______________________________________________ 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.
