I personally find this deeply disturbing and sets a dangerous precedent. The sale essentially happened in secret, where ARDC sold off a public resource for amateur use, without public input. Amateurs had been asking for IP allocations in 44-net and being denied. Now we know why. Step back and ask yourself - if the ARRL negotiated to petition the FCC to give up a block of spectrum in exchange for money that we could use for scholarships and grants, how would our members react to this? When we are willing to sell off our resources, I'm sure someone is now asking if we can part with some of our bands for the right amount of money. I heard that some traders want HF spectrum for low latency trading. We better get in on it while it's hot. Millions are at stake. It may very well be that we don't need all of these addresses, but this should never have been a decision solely by Phil Karn and friends, just like any spectrum decision is not solely within the purview of the ARRL. Hams in the know are already asking tough questions about this, to ARIN especially. In particular, while ARDC has been coordinating allocations from the 44/8 network, their role was supposed to be more of a caretaker rather than an owner of the block. Therefore there are serious concerns as to whether they are entitled to sell it. 73 Ria, N2RJ On Thu, 8 Aug 2019 at 17:00, Richard J. Norton <richardjnorton@gmail.com> wrote:
As most of you are aware, a group of Radio Amateurs has recently sold some Internet addresses related to ham radio and will be using the funds received to benefit Amateur Radio. At the request of ARRL Foundation president David Woolweaver, K5RAV, I have connected with Phil Karn, KA9Q, who appears to be heading the group.
Phil Karn is a technical ham and a retired VP of Qualcomm. Among other things, he is active in the technical end of Winlink operations.
The group sold 25% of its IP addresses, all of them believed to be unused since bring acquired.
From Phil - The group is
ARDC - Amateur Radio Digital Communications:
https://www.ampr.org/ and see https://www.ampr.org/giving/ Be patient, it's still very much under construction.
It's a 501(c)(3) at the moment. I'm told we'll have to transition it to a foundation with different tax rules, but tax law (especially for nonprofits) is not my specialty so I'll defer to the experts.
Informal request: if you refer to us as the group that sold Internet addresses, please refer to us as the group that sold UNUSED internet addresses. To my knowledge, the block in question (44.192.0.0/10) was NEVER advertised to the regular internet routers, i.e., traffic with those addresses never flowed on the "real" Internet. For reasons I don't completely understand, the German network used some of them internally much as you probably use the 192.168.1.0/28 block on your home network, so their internal operation is completely unaffected by the sale. And they're renumbering anyway.
We sold 1/4 of the original address space, which was 44.0.0.0/8. We still have 44.0.0.0/9 and 44.128.0.0/10.
Our interchange of information was cordial and potentially productive. We have similar objectives for ham radio.
The amount of money ARDC received for the addresses was not provided to me, but based on the reported selling prices for IP addresses, it is believed to be between $50 and $90 million dollars. This likely means that ARDC has substantially more financial resources than the ARRL, with its total assets of approximately $35 million and squirreled nestegg of approximately $20 million.
We reviewed the nature of a number of groups with financial assets dedicated to various aspects of ham radio. Karn was unfamiliar with those centered on on-the-air activities such as DXing and contesting, but seemed open to the value they bring to the overall Amateur community.
Specifically, we discussed ARDC's near-term scholarship plan, which was pegged at about twice the total value of all the scholarships awarded by the ARRL Foundation. Karn presently funds a couple of scholarships by himself through the Foundation for Amateur Radio, so he was familiar with that group. At this time, I don't believe that ARRL Foundation's somewhat costly scholarship program will interest ARDC.
ARDC likely will have a reasonably significant impact on Amateur Radio.
The need for the ARRL or any other ham radio group to raise significant money is substantially diminished.
Our problem is to find useful projects to fund.
73,
Dick Norton, N6AA
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