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The Internic is the sole and ultimate assigning entity of IP space, Ummm, no. RIPE-NCC and APNIC also assign address space as regional registries, CANET, JPNIC, KRNIC, and AUNIC/Telstra assign space as national registries. One might claim the IANA has the ultimate responsibility regarding address space, but this is somewhat irrelevant to this discussion.

I have not followed most of this addressing thread, most of it seems quite weird anyway. I sure agree that alot of it is irrelevant to the discussion, and the right thing to do is rather to focus on how to evolve things right and gracefully and scalable in the future. This may have been said before, my apologies if I am repeating things, but this ownership and IANA and InterNIC takeover stuff and so is totally distorted it seems. Prior to the mid-80's (when TCP-IP was on its way out and to be succeeded by GOSSIP, and could never top DECNET and SNA and Novell anyway) the IP address space was in the playpen of the United States Department of Defense, simply for the reasons that they designed this IP protocol toy for their purposes, and had all the rights in the world to do with its bit space whatever they felt like. Jon Postel and Joyce Reynolds were the two ending up under ARPA contract to assign addresses and other numbers (IP protocol, TCP port, whatever). ARPA also created the IAB and the GADS, to help them with expertise advise relative to their project, the GADS was then split into the IETF and the IRTF (I think they were initially called something like INENG and INARC (engineering and architecture), though). With this, and some responsibilities getting fuzzier (like NSF jumping in and ejecting TCP/IP into the real world) at some point of time Jon/Joyce's roles got more formally called the IANA. I don't know when the term exactly came up, and what the rationale was, but I am pretty sure that things were still in ARPA's sandbox then, and I am pretty sure IANA was created as an IAB function for ARPA. But ARPA was not in a position to do all these assignments and work (ain't exactly 10 year out high risk research any more), so especially NSF helped out funding the (ARPA) NIC (then at SRI). NSF was the logical choice, as it brought the IP networking to the masses, so it seemed logical that NSF become responsible for assignment for the masses, and publicly had a competition for the InterNIC, which was then won by three different parties for three different function. Of course, nobody wanted to piss ARPA or especially Jon and Joyce off (they both are excellent people), so why rock the boat about IANA terminology, besides, they were still involved, assigned lots of (other) numbers, and were a good resource to help the InterNIC. ARPA and other agencies were quite well aware and I think in line with the InterNIC creation. About every several months this argument flared up about who owns the address space in variety of camps for the last many years. Always winded down after a while, as people figure they have better things to do, and things were kinda working anyway. Guess that was prior to the Internet explosion in the last two years or so, though. In the meantime, yeah, formally I guess one would claim that the Internet address space is the personal property of the IANA instrument of the United States Department of Defense, if that is what you like. I would prefer to think that the Internet evolved so much over the last ten years or so into the public realm, that the address and naming spaces have become public property. Instead of bitching about the InterNIC, NSF, ARPA, IANA, whoever, you guys should thank them for how far they got things driven, and whet they fostered and allowed to transition to the international private sector. Don't get me wrong, I had my own misgiving at times with the responsiveness of the InterNIC at times, but life just is hard on an exponential curve, especially if the incoming resources/revenue stream does not follow the curve. The self-sustaining nature of the InterNIC was already built into it when NSF solicited proposals for it, just read the damn thing. $50 is not a problem for a commercial company that has all the other miscellaneous costs of having equipment and connecting it to the Internet and wanting to get marketing leverage out of their www.company.com advertisement material, unless you make a problem out of it, though it is an annoyance big enough to hopefully keep alot of trash out, and it gives the United States Federal Government an opportunity to even let go more of its children. Then again, the children seem in puberty and like to bitch.