Alan Hannan asked:

What are the correlations and contrasts between our current backbone routing problems (wrt space and # of routes) and the FCC decision several years ago to make 1-800 numbers portable.

There is a major difference between ownership of IP network numbers and telephone number portability: the economic benefits of ownership of addresses are not comparable to those of ownership of telephone numbers. As far as I know, the economic benefits of network number ownership are confined to cost avoidance related to re-numbering. A major argument for ownership of telephone numbers (and especially freephone - e.g., 800 - numbers) is that the subscriber makes an investment (by advertising, letterhead, etc) getting knowledge of a subscriber's phone number to customers, friends, and other correspondents. Since the knowledge (as used by humans) of how to reach a "subscriber" on the Internet is encoded in a DNS name and not in an address, no comparable argument can be made for ownership of addresses. Stephen Geis ITU geis@itu.ch