At 04:16 PM 10/5/98 -0500, Karl Denninger wrote:
On Mon, Oct 05, 1998 at 02:13:11PM -0700, Tony Li wrote:
karl@Mcs.Net (Karl Denninger) writes:
Specifically, RFC2008 says:
While it has never been explicitly stated that various Internet Registries use the "address ownership" allocation policy, it has always been assumed (and practiced).
That sentence, in particular the last five words of that sentence, are extremely important. 10+ years of a given practice and set of operating rules cannot be overturned by fiat.
One might notice that these words were written in an RFC. Not in a law book.
Then so does ARIN's and the IANA's ability to control and delegate addresses.
You can't have it both ways. Either the IETF process is valid, in which case the precedents it sets are also valid, or it is not, in which case none of the existing "organizations" have any validity at all, INCLUDING THOSE POSTULATED UNDER THE WHITE PAPER AND THE IANA2 DOCUMENTS.
Which would you prefer?
I dunno, considering that the White Paper process is in critical care ICU, at the moment, and the USG may be hi-jacking the Internet in general. That's a real interesting question. If you've been keeping up with the ICANN issue, and read their Article/by-laws, you'd be wondering the same thing. You might want to drop by the http://www.open-rsc.org web-site, or see what's been happening in DOMAIN-POLICY. FYI: I've been involved with the IFWP process through ORSC/IRSC and support the Boston Working Group (BWG) proposal. Draft 5 Postel is unacceptable to me and anyone else running a gTLD registry, IMHO. As regards the IETF, the RFC's have always been mis named, as they are really defacto InterNet standards. However, note that there is no enforcement. They are NOT a matter of law. In most cases, they are only superficailly complied with. Besides which, most of those standards are along the lines of "If you want to do this, and you want to internetwork with others in this, then this is how you do it". IETF is not a regulatory standards body and don't wish to be. This is why their documents are *called* RFCs, n'est pas? Mostly, MHSC uses the RFCs as a best-practices document set. If we find a better way to do something that fits in our operations plans better, then that's what we'll do. Take RFC2010 for instance. We're re-writing that for internal use, as it's not cost-effective with hardware and modern operational practices/software/systems. We *may* submit the final as an upgrade to 2010. Are regards ARIN and IANA, their only jurisdiction is the public InterNet. Internally, with NAT and VPNs, most ISPs assign their own addresses. ___________________________________________________ Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer@mhsc.com>rmeyer@mhsc.com Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/ ___________________________________________ I bet the human brain is a kludge. -- Marvin Minsky