On Wed, 21 Aug 2019 10:53:18 +0100, William Waites via 44Net 44net@mailman.ampr.org wrote:
I made just such a report to ARIN shortly after this came to light. The basic argument is that the original allocation was not made to the individuals but to the community, and the individuals (and later successor organisation ARDC) managed the addresses in trust for the community. They never owned it and therefore had no ability to sell it. This interpretation of the nature of the original allocation is supported by people who were around at the time, as well as the treatment of similar allocations e.g. SATNet, but of course explicit documentation of this is thin.
If your theory that the original assignees had no right of ownership, in trust or otherwise, is true; then it is equally true that the original assignment by IANA was invalid. (AFAIK, Jon Postel WAS IANA.) If the assignment of net 44 was invalid then ALL assignments by IANA are invalid. It can then be argued that ARIN as inheritor of those assignments has no authority.
Since TCP/IP was invented by DoD under the auspices of DARPA at U.S. taxpayer expense then the People of the United States are the true owners of all IP space and all sales of IP addresses and all proceeds from those sales were conducted in their name and those monies belong to the United States. Furthermore, all users of TCP/IP and Ethernet owe licensing fees to the taxpayers for use of the patents and technologies developed in their name. Do you see a can of worms yet?
Net 44 is held in trust "for the community" and the community is the worldwide population of radio amateurs not just the current population of address holders. To say otherwise is to disenfranchise all radio amateurs worldwide.
This raises the question of how you would elect a board from the worldwide population and how you would validate and certify the election results. Would you elect a committee to oversee and certify an election of the board? It's turtles all the way down.