4 ms·

Without going into too much depth, there was considerable controversy over this planned sale because of questions about ARDC's authority to make decisions invol

Without going into too much depth, there was considerable controversy over this planned sale because of questions about ARDC's authority to make decisions involving this IP space (ownership of the IP block was never really assigned to ARDC per se but rather assumed due to lack of another clear owner), some historic bad blood between some amateur radio groups and ARDC (involving in part ARDC's administration of this IP space), and due to a perceived conflict of interest involving the ARDC board of directors. This was a big enough and loud enough issue for a while that it's kind of odd to see any announcement of this transaction being closed that doesn't mention the upset when it was first proposed. Overall I think the sale was the right thing to do, but it is the fruit of a poisoned tree to some extent, and there will be ongoing questions about whether or not ARDC should really be in control of these funds. I am personally most just concerned about ARDC's ability to competently manage such a large endowment, since historically they've been a fairly low-activity group with some odd internal dynamics and a bit of a rift with some other amateur radio groups. On the other hand, maybe the endowment will allow them to hire a competent staff and become much more involved in promoting digital amateur radio.

j_walter 6y ago
> On the other hand, maybe the endowment will allow them to hire a competent staff... Does that ever really happen? If they are competent enough to know they need a better staff that's one thing, but if they are already incompetent they will just blow through the endowment with nothing to show for it.
Glanford 6y ago
A considerable controversy exists over the fact that the IPs were allocated to the global amateur radio community to be self-administered, but due to the sale the 044/8 block is now administered by ARIN. The sale hugely benefits an American company, Amazon, with the profits going to ARDC who will likely be biased in benefiting or providing preferential treatment to the American amateur radio community by virtue of themselves being an American company, and despite claims that the sold IPs were unallocated and unused they were in fact partially allocated and used by Europeans. There could have been a legitimate discussion on whether the amateur radio community really needed some 16M IP addresses and if a partial sale of the resource could have benefited the community more, but any such discussion was denied when the ARDC decided to do backroom deals with IPs they might not legally have had ownership over. Still, $108 million is a lot more than the 'couple of million' to $50m rumours that were floating about at the time of sale, hopefully they can do some good with the money and buy back some goodwill. Let's just hope the wholesale of prices of IPv4 addresses doesn't rise too much leading to another /10 sale, or if it does that they sell off their own blocks instead of the blocks allocated to the rest of the world.
- lima 6y ago
  > The sale hugely benefits an American company, Amazon, with the profits going to ARDC who will likely be biased in benefiting or providing preferential treatment to the American amateur radio community by virtue of themselves being an American company, and despite claims that the sold IPs were unallocated and unused they were in fact partially allocated and used by Europeans. Yep, HAMNET[1] had to renumber parts of their network, which isn't a lot of fun when your routers are on antenna towers. ARDC is funding only US entities at this time: https://www.ampr.org/giving/ https://www.ampr.org/giving/ [1]: https://hamnetdb.net https://hamnetdb.net

j_walter 6y ago

> On the other hand, maybe the endowment will allow them to hire a competent staff... Does that ever really happen? If they are competent enough to know they need a better staff that's one thing, but if they are already incompetent they will just blow through the endowment with nothing to show for it.

Glanford 6y ago

A considerable controversy exists over the fact that the IPs were allocated to the global amateur radio community to be self-administered, but due to the sale the 044/8 block is now administered by ARIN. The sale hugely benefits an American company, Amazon, with the profits going to ARDC who will likely be biased in benefiting or providing preferential treatment to the American amateur radio community by virtue of themselves being an American company, and despite claims that the sold IPs were unallocated and unused they were in fact partially allocated and used by Europeans. There could have been a legitimate discussion on whether the amateur radio community really needed some 16M IP addresses and if a partial sale of the resource could have benefited the community more, but any such discussion was denied when the ARDC decided to do backroom deals with IPs they might not legally have had ownership over. Still, $108 million is a lot more than the 'couple of million' to $50m rumours that were floating about at the time of sale, hopefully they can do some good with the money and buy back some goodwill. Let's just hope the wholesale of prices of IPv4 addresses doesn't rise too much leading to another /10 sale, or if it does that they sell off their own blocks instead of the blocks allocated to the rest of the world.

lima 6y ago
> The sale hugely benefits an American company, Amazon, with the profits going to ARDC who will likely be biased in benefiting or providing preferential treatment to the American amateur radio community by virtue of themselves being an American company, and despite claims that the sold IPs were unallocated and unused they were in fact partially allocated and used by Europeans. Yep, HAMNET[1] had to renumber parts of their network, which isn't a lot of fun when your routers are on antenna towers. ARDC is funding only US entities at this time: https://www.ampr.org/giving/ https://www.ampr.org/giving/ [1]: https://hamnetdb.net https://hamnetdb.net