[address-policy-wg] Enabling Methods for Reallocation of IPv4 Resources

I've been looking at policy proposal 2007-08 about transfering addresses
between LIRs directly. I'm not sure what the current status of this is,
but it is one of a family of similar proposals before ARIN and APNIC. In
the other RIRs, people who support this type of transfer proposal seem
to consider it to be the first step towards trading in IP address
contracts, i.e. creating a market for buying and selling contracts which
give the right to use IP addresses.

I've been reading through the MiFID directives and some of the English
language material covering MiFID, trying to figure out whether these IP
address contracts would fall under the MiFID guidelines. Of course, EU
guidelines are not the same as laws, and the laws in this area enable a
regulator, who then goes on to make regulations. I have come to the
conclusion that the Dutch law is the one that is most likely to
currently apply, since RIPE is run out of Amsterdam and since the policy
proposal calls on RIPE to register these transfers.

My knowledge of the Germanic languages is not good enough to really make
sense of the Dutch legislation. I wonder if someone who speaks Dutch, or
who is a native speaker of German or a Scandinavian language, could have
a look at the text of the Dutch law here
<http://www.st-ab.nl/wetten/0490_Wet_financiele_dienstverlening_Wfd.htm>
to see if the definitions cover the sale of contracts which give the
right to use IP addresses. I'm pretty sure that "effect" in Article 1(i)
defines what is a "security" but since MiFID has a lot of text about
which kind of organizations and activities are covered by the new rules,
I suspect you would need to read more than the definition of this one
term.

Since many people seem to have a vision of an IP address trading market
that functions similar to a securities market like Euronext, I think
that we need some proper legal guidance that tells us the boundaries for
RIPE policy. If we step over those boundaries, then the MiFID rules will
apply to everything that we do with IPv4 address allocations.

--Michael Dillon