[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[John Curran]

On Oct 11, 2010, at 9:49 PM, Randy Bush wrote:

>> Randy was there, and is correct ** if by "chain of responsibility"
>> you're looking for a proscriptive delegation of authority along those
>> precise lines from DARPA to the RIRs of the present day **
> 
> indeed.  and, until this is decided in the courts, we can all opine as
> much as we wish.  and, sad to say, with all the hard-ass positions folk
> seem to take, it will pretty surely be in the courts.

The only reason that a clearer proscriptive delegation did not appear
was that there was a large portion of the community that considered 
Jon-as-IANA-by-way-of-IAB as *the* authority, and another large part
of the community considered the USG (by nature of its role in creation)
as *the* authority.  When you have multiple prospective authorities, 
the result is not going to be nice clean delegation chain.

However, given the historical record of Jon's role in the formation of 
ARIN (including sitting ex-officio on the initial Board) as well as 
the USG direction via the referenced NSF cooperative agreement and its 
modifications, ARIN's responsibility to handle these tasks is quite clear.  
We continue to do these tasks, on behalf of whichever authority you care to 
recognize, since inception.  One hopes that the community-based processes 
we use for policy formation as well as adherence to the principles in RFC2050 
provides fidelity to our mission, but that's obviously of matter of personal
judgement.

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN