Jack, Tuesday, February 4, 2003, 8:24:58 AM, you wrote:
A flag day is not possible for changing the infrastructure of any network operation that is large. JB> That is true. However, there comes a day when enough people are implementing JB> a technology that one can make the decision to flip the switch on their JB> network.
You are willing to wait 10-15 years before seeing any improvement in service? You think people will bother to develop, ship and buy enhancements that will not be useful for 10-15 years? JB> While there is no single authority, I'd be happy with a US and JB> European based authorities for their respective companies. There is no single authority for U.S. companies' network operations. There is not single authority for European companies' network operations. Each has tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of "authorities". JB> happy if whois data was enforced to be accurate again. 555-5555 is not a JB> valid phone number the last time I checked yet it's listed all over whois You are confusing network operations with network address assignment. There IS a single global authority for the top of the global, telephone numbering scheme and it carefully delegates authority down the tree. Hence the fact that the 555-* numbers are reserved is because the North American Numbering Plan is under a single authority. The topic being discussed in this thread is not subject to any such authority hierarchy. To the extent that you might want to claim that IP addresses are like phone numbers, they differ in this specific regard: although there is an assignment hierarchy, the numbers, themselves, do not reflect that heirarchy. Hence there is no space-efficient way of noting an authority chain, other than entering every single IP address ever assigned, all in one big data base. Alas, that ain't feasible. At a minimum, it is essentially impossible to keep such a database up to date. d/ -- Dave <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com> Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com> t +1.408.246.8253; f +1.408.850.1850