[sig-policy]Policy proposal: Historical Resource Transfer
Attached is a policy paper which is scheduled for the Address Policy SIG at
APNIC 16.
Please feel free to send comments or questions to this list, or to me
directly by email.
Hope to see you in Seoul,
________________________________________________________________________
Paul Wilson, Director-General, APNIC <dg at apnic dot net>
http://www.apnic.net ph/fx +61 7 3858 3100/99
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See you at APNIC 16
Seoul, Korea, 19-22 August 2003 http://www.apnic.net/meetings
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Supporting Historical Resource Transfer
Proposed by: Paul Wilson, APNIC Secretariat
Version: 1.0
Date: 18 July 2003
1 Summary
There are 2 types of Internet resources managed by APNIC:
"current" resources, registered by APNIC under explicit
policies and agreements; and "historical" resources,
registered under early registry policies without formal
agreements. Some of the historical resources managed by
APNIC were registered by APNIC during its early days (prior
to the existence of a membership structure); while some were
registered by other registries prior to the RIR system, then
subsequently transferred to APNIC.
It is consistent with IP resource management goals that all
resource registrations managed by APNIC be properly
maintained under current agreements, for reasons of accuracy
of registration, fairness of distribution, and efficiency of
management. To this end, it is proposed that APNIC
introduce policies to facilitate the voluntary transfer of
historical resource registrations from the applicable
resource holders, to organisations which are current APNIC
members. These transfers would be subject to no approval
criteria, but following transfer, transferred resource would
be considered as "current" and therefore subject to all
applicable APNIC policies.
2 Background and Rationale
As mentioned above, historical resource registrations
(including IPv4 address blocks and AS numbers) are
maintained by APNIC without any covering agreements of any
kind. Most of these registrations were initially made by
the global predecessor registries of ARIN (DDN-NIC, SRI-NIC,
InterNIC), and inherited automatically by ARIN on its
establishment. Such registrations, where made to
organisations in the APNIC region, are being transferred to
APNIC during 2003, through the RIRs' "Early Registration
Transfer" (ERX) project. In addition to these, some
historical resource registrations have been inherited by
APNIC from the former AUNIC address registry.
Because historical resources are not governed by any formal
agreement, there is little or no incentive for resource
holders to maintain registrations, nor to return to APNIC
any resources which are not being used. In some cases, the
resources concerned have been claimed dishonestly (or
"hijacked") by third parties; and in a minority of these,
resources have then been used for hacking or spamming
activities.
The APNIC membership as a whole continues to incur financial
and technical costs for the maintenance of historical
resource registrations, while resource holders receive a
benefit at no cost. In addition, the possible illegal use of
incorrectly registered resources may create a legal
liability or risk for APNIC, with the potential for
associated costs to APNIC members.
3 Proposal
In response to the problems described above, it is proposed
that measures be considered which will, over time, bring
historical resource registrations into the current policy
framework. A specific measure proposed is to allow
historical resources which are not required by their
registered holder to be easily transferred to organisations
which hold current agreements with APNIC, on the
understanding that those resources will then be considered
"current" and therefore subject to the appropriate policies
and agreements.
Importantly, it is proposed that these resource transfers
should be recognised and registered by APNIC without the
requirement for technical review or approval. The only
conditions placed upon a transfer would be: that the holder
of the historical resource is verified and registered; and
that both parties give explicit consent to a transfer.
It is noted that APNIC will not review any agreements
between the parties to a transfer, and will exert no control
over the type of agreement which may be made.
4 Implementation
Four specific steps will need to be taken, in sequence, in
order to process a transfer under this policy:
a. validation and registration of the existing holder;
b. verification of their intention to transfer a resource;
c. verification of the recipient's consent to receive a
transfer; and
d. registration of the transferred resource.
APNIC procedures already include well established processes
for validating historical resource registrations, including
documentation, request forms, and statutory
declaration/indemnification forms (step a above). An
additional transfer form would be developed for historical
resource holders to request a transfer to a specific party,
identified as a current APNIC member (step b).
It is noted that an organisation wishing to receive a
transfer must be a member of APNIC prior to the lodgement of
a transfer request form. This new member organisation would
not be required to pay the "Resource Request Processing Fee"
in order to receive a transfer (however it would have to pay
that fee at a later time in order to submit a conventional
resource request to APNIC).
On receipt of a validated request form (step b above), APNIC
will contact the member organisation named as recipient, to
verify that they wish to receive the resource (step c). An
appropriate interface could be developed within MyAPNIC to
support this process, however this is not likely to be
required initially.
Finally, APNIC would register the transferred resource and
notify the registered holder, as it does in the case of any
normal resource allocation (step c).
It is noted that resources transferred under this policy
would thereafter be subject to the provisions of all normal
address management policies. Specifically: the use of
transferred resources would need to be documented as a part
of current resource holdings in any future APNIC address
requests; and the transferred resources would be considered
in the assessment of the APNIC membership tier of the
organisation, on the renewal of their membership.
If is proposed to implement this policy three months after
approval by the APNIC community.