Summary

  • Mike Burns was the originator of a 2011 ARIN transfer proposal that included a twelve-month bar on becoming the source of another IPv4 transfer after receiving addresses. The 2012 policy discussion described the wait as a brake on flipping.
  • ARIN staff at ARIN 58 wanted recipients to see the existing rule sooner. Burns proposed deleting it. Staff said that would require a separate policy change; the wait remains in ARIN’s current transfer guidance.

Imagine installing a lock because the room will approve the door only with a lock, then returning years later to ask for a screwdriver. That was Mike Burns’s position at ARIN 58. Staff had brought a narrow problem: organizations receive IPv4 space, later seek to transfer out an existing block, and discover that receiving any space has started a twelve-month clock. The source condition is written where a prospective seller will look. A prospective buyer may never see it until the plan is already underway.

The meeting question was whether to repeat the restriction in the recipient section and whether an early source request deserved a resource review. Scott Johnson supplied the operator’s test: if an ISP already holds several /24s and acquires a /20, are the old blocks caught too? John Sweeting answered yes. Kaitlyn Pellak pressed the renumbering case, in which a smaller incoming block could free a larger one. Sweeting described an existing route for qualifying smaller blocks and acknowledged that some applicants never escalate the problem to him.

Then Burns approached the microphone. He said he had put the wait into the manual roughly thirteen years earlier, reluctantly, to address fear of flipping. His fix was neither another warning nor an audit: remove the wait. The record supports the long arc. ARIN’s 2011 proposal archive names him as originator and includes the twelve-month source condition. The 2012 meeting record identifies flipping as the concern. At ARIN 51 in 2023, Burns had already said the wait was a concession he disliked from the start.

The room did not repeal it. Sweeting said Burns’s remedy would need a new proposal; the exercise on the floor was about making current terms easier to find. ARIN’s transfer guide still states the twelve-month source restriction and its specified exceptions. A rule can survive long after its drafter has changed his mind. Here the awkward part is that the person asking for the screwdriver knows exactly which screw he tightened.