ARIN CEO rejects legislative ask for IP address record rules

A regional internet registry is going to walk-back a controversial request it made to Parliament asking for federal rules on IP address record-keeping, which the head of the organization said wasn’t approved by its own board of trustees or CEO before it was submitted and was never officially their position. American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) CEO John Curran tells The Wire Report that he had not approved the submission asking for new rules before it was submitted to Parliament and was surprised to learn about it. He said his organization has started a review of its internal processes so it doesn’t happen again. “ were never ARIN’s position at all. I’m still looking into how those positions got written and filed on behalf of ARIN,” he said on the phone Monday evening. “We perform a coordination function and we just want to be able to continue to do coordination. We don’t really ever seek anything else, other than to be able to keep the internet running.” He said ARIN routinely briefs dozens of governments and international organizations for informational purposes about the internet number registry system, and the messaging is usually standard so it wasn’t all reviewed for approval -- something he said will have to change now. The Wire Report had reported Friday that ARIN’s submission to the House of Commons industry committee recommended Ottawa take “legislative or regulatory action” to legally require organizations assigning internet numbers to third parties maintain updated Whois information. Its suggested actions would have affected ISPs such as BCE Inc., Rogers Communications Inc. and Telus Corp., among other companies. Whois is an online directory that allows people to publicly search records of names, locations and contact information for IP address or domain-name owners. It is often used for legal purposes by law enforcement and for identifying copyright infringers. ARIN is the regional organization responsible for allocating IP numbers to intermediaries in Canada, the United States and much of the Caribbean. The submission had raised concerns that companies aren’t incentivized to maintain accurate IP address records for Whois under the new internet protocol number regime, IPv6. It warned that ARIN’s past carrot-and-stick approach no longer works due to how supplying IP addresses has changed, which could eventually hurt the Whois tool and affect those fighting copyright violations. That submission raised eyebrows among some in North America’s internet governance community, given that the organization has tended to shy away from any kind of government regulatory involvement. Professor Milton Mueller, director of the Internet Governance Project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, had told The Wire Report that the proposals in the submission run against the entire point of having “transnational, private sector-based governance institutions” like ARIN to deal with “critical internet resources.” The Internet Governance Project’s Twitter account criticized the organization Friday evening after the news broke for “abandoning multi-stakeholder governance” and bowing to the “copyright lobby.” Curran replied his organization is “setting processes so this will not recur & will seek to amend to accurately reflect ARIN's position.” The House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology finished its public hearings on Canada’s Copyright Act in December and then published the remaining submissions sent in to the committee on its website. ARIN officials did not appear during the proceedings, but the organization’s submission was posted publicly online in late December alongside the other 191 briefs submitted. The committee aims to table its final report on its statutory review of the Copyright Act sometime in April or May, just ahead of the coming October election. — With reporting by Kyle Duggan at kduggan@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

ARIN CEO rejects legislative ask for IP address record rules

News | January 8, 2019

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ARIN CEO rejects legislative ask for IP address record rules

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