On Thu, 10 Apr 1997, Deepak Jain wrote:
I can see why the NSI doesn't want to share.
I can also why they must be made to share.
Isn't April 1997 the end of their contract anyway?
The official end is April 1998. However, the NSF had arranged to end the contract early on March 31st of this year until the politicians stepped in and the NSF Office of the Inspector General released a report suggesting that the NSF should run the Internic in order to make money for the government. But it was the Whitehouse, in the form of Ira Magaziner's committee that actually put a stop to the ending of that contract. Some collateral damage that occurred was that the contract deal included rolling out the IP allocation functions to ARIN with seed money from NSI but that also got stopped. And now there are people in the Pentagon and the National Security Agency that believe ARIN is an important national security issue and needs to be stopped. It appears that since IP technology played an important role in the Gulf War they want to ensure that the U.S. military has all the IP addresses they need in future. Somebody should tell them it's not smart to run a military command and control system over the public data networks. If they would only build their own private satellite network, maybe call it MILNET, then they could use their own set of private IP addresses without worrying about what the public is doing. It will be very interesting to see what happens at the April 14th-15th meeting of the NSF's Federal Networking Council Advisory Council meeting in Washington where both domain names and ARIN are on the agenda. Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com