On Wed, Dec 24, 1997 at 11:11:39AM +0000, Richard Welty wrote:
i think you have no comprehension of how GE works.
Oh, I think a number of people do, and its why some of us have stated, multiple times, that the current policies are discriminatory and ARE going to lead to court cases, lawyers, and trouble for ARIN and others who have and continue to control this process.
GE has, over a period of years, consolidated their address space into 3 as they become better integrated with the public internet. at one time, this space was exposed to the public. having been badly burned by hackers once or twice, GE has moved most, if not all, of this space behind firewalls; based on conversations i had with some of the GE R&D systems staff a year or so back, i believe that their intent is that little, of any, of 3.0.0.0/8 is to be exposed to the open net; the gateways that i've used in the past use addresses in 192.something as their public face.
so there are probably no technical reasons why GE couldn't just hand 3.0.0.0/8 back -- because of the firewalling; they probably don't really even need to renumber into 10.0.0.0/8 (and based on my experience, any effort to renumber the corporation from 3 to 10 would be doomed to failure.). the reasons why the addresses won't be returned are part of corporate culture, and have to do with the fact that there is little motivation for GE to hand the old Class A back -- they aren' t paying for it, and aren't going to in the near future, and if ARIN tried to charge them for it, it'd just result in a court case -- GE has very good lawyers on retainer, and lots of them.
We through ARIN and others should be reallocated this address space for the public use of our subscribers.
greater good arguments don't cut it with GE management, unless it's for the greater good of the shareholders.
richard -- Richard Welty Chief Internet Engineer, INet Solutions welty@inet-solutions.net http://www.inet-solutions.net/~welty/ 888-311-INET
And THERE lies the problem. See, ARIN wants to claim that others can't have what GE has. Further, ARIN, along with the IANA, wants to claim that people should "give back" space that they are not effeciently using to connect to the Internet - unless, of course, you're someone like MIT, GE, or PSI. Hiding 95% of your hosts behind firewalls is fine. But if you're doing that, you only need 5% of the space you would otherwise need to be "exposed", and thus on public routable space. Until ARIN and the IANA come to grips with the FACT that the current and past policy in fact discriminatorily disadvantages some organizations and providers while allowing others free run with either new or previous allocations, the risk of serious legal and social challenges remains high. ARIN doesn't like this one bit; I'm on the AC, and even with my being on the "inside" it is difficult to impossible to get the ARIN people to recognize the problem, say much less do anything about it. The reason, of course, is political - guess what happens if they DO address it? Lots of people get upset, and some of them have a lot of money and lawyers. What's not being paid attention to is that the number of parties who are being screwed is growing. Sooner or later they will reach critical mass and form a class looking for redress, and when that happens there will be trouble. IANA, with the people there believing they are insulated from any real risk due to their being technically employees of a publically-funded university, has an even-more-discriminatory worldview on this. ARIN and/or the IANA are eventually going to tangle with someone who has both lawyers and money, and comes to the conclusion that both they *AND THE CORPORATIONS WHO HAVE BENEFITTED FROM THE DISCRIMINATORY BEHAVIOR* make nice, fat, juicy targets for some legal action. IMHO, that organization will be proven correct. It is critically important to the operational stability of the Internet that this problem is addressed BEFORE someone files a $100M lawsuit and names some of the world's largest backbone providers and corporations, along with ARIN and the IANA, as defendants over this issue. Both ARIN and the IANA would have to fold in the face of such a challenge. Now we have *NO* delegation path available, and the likely result would be chaos. -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin http://www.mcs.net/ | T1's from $600 monthly to FULL DS-3 Service | NEW! K56Flex support on ALL modems Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| EXCLUSIVE NEW FEATURE ON ALL PERSONAL ACCOUNTS Fax: [+1 312 803-4929] | *SPAMBLOCK* Technology now included at no cost