On Wed, 2016-03-02 at 00:44 -0500, William Herrin wrote:
Do I have the legal right to exclude others from announcing my block of IP addresses to the public Internet routing tables? It's not well tested in court but the odds are exceptionally strong that I do.
If I own some property - say a field - the location of that field is with certain rare exceptions public information. I as the owner cannot enforce a requirement on you to NOT tell people where my field is. I can't demand that you NOT build roads past it, or that you NOT put up signs saying how to get to my field, or even that you NOT tell people who owns the field. I have the right to exclusive use of the property, but I have no rights to information about the property, nor any property rights outside the boundary of the property. Testing in court the idea that you may not advertise my routes would be a fascinating exercise. If you falsely advertised them it would be a different matter. Has this sort of thing been tested in the courts at all? In any jurisdiction?
Indeed, the whole point of registration is to facilitate determination of -who- has the exclusive right over -which- blocks of addresses.
The problem is what rights we are talking about. I would say that practically speaking the only real right here is the right to configure an address on an interface. But anyone else can send packets to an address, or advertise to others the direction of travel towards that network. Malicious activity excluded of course - DoS attacks and so on, but I think the issues there are different. Also, contractually regulated relationships are different - if I connect something up to ISPX and have a contract with ISPX to NOT advertise the route to me, then ISPX is constrained. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (kauer@biplane.com.au) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://twitter.com/kauer389 GPG fingerprint: E00D 64ED 9C6A 8605 21E0 0ED0 EE64 2BEE CBCB C38B Old fingerprint: 3C41 82BE A9E7 99A1 B931 5AE7 7638 0147 2C3C 2AC4