New ICANN/USG contract for IANA services

[Jeremy Porter]

One wonders if the following wording was deliberate:
The ASO has three members: the three Regional Internet Registries (APNIC, ARIN, and 
RIPE NCC) that have been delegated responsibility by the IANA for routine 
allocation and assignment within their respective regions. These three 
organizations select members of the ASO's Address Council, which is responsible 
for developing consensus-based recommended policies concerning the operation, 
assignment and management of Internet (IP) addresses. 

i.e. with respect to "routine" assignments.

Further:
- Allocation of IP address blocks. This involves overall responsibility for 
the allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 address space. It includes delegations of 
IP address blocks to regional registries for routine allocation, typically 
through downstream providers, to Internet end-users within the regions served 
by those registries. It also includes reservation and direct allocation of 
space for special purposes, such as multicast addressing, cable blocks, 
addresses for private networks as described in RFC 1918, and globally specified 
applications.

Presumable the wording of this is only a little lacking, in the term
"cable blocks", because I'd like to get address from those special blocks
since my address come over a "wire" or "cable".  Sigh.  Ok thats a red herring
of sorts, as I'd guess the intent was to include the situtation where
blocks for cable televions providers who are providing service over their
HFC cable plants, are coming out of a different address range than other
providers.  But  these "globally specified applications" worry me a bit.

After the last ICANN meeting in LA, I thought the pretty clear consesous from
everyone except the telephone companies, was that IP assignment was application
neutral as far as policy was concerned, and that the ad-hoc committee as formed
by the Santigio meeting was only to review and recommened new changes providing
that they are merited, and the the IAB's concernces about non application
neutrality were addressed.

This response to RFC and contract seem to violate the spirit if not the letter
of the agreements at these meetings, and that the US Governement has allowed
ICANN to piggy back into a narrow window from a period of Feb 02 to Feb 09, is
a cause if significant interest.

The forces that want to staticly assign an IP address to every telephone handset,
because that is the easly solution, as opposed to the correct solution, may
already have won.

This clearly needs to be discussed at the ICANN meeting in Cairo and
and the next ARIN public policy meeting.

Needless to say, I will be bringing this up in both forums.



In message <4.1.20000214140539.00c67d50 at 192.149.252.141>, Kim Hubbard writes:
>Hello,
>
>I thought you might be interested in reading the newly signed contract
>between ICANN and USG pertaining to IANA services, particularly interesting
>is the section relating to IP numbers.
>
>The ICANN responded to a USG RFQ on 2/2/00 and the contract was signed
>2/9/00.  
>
>The ICANN proposal is located at:
>http://www.icann.org/general/iana-proposal-02feb00.htm
>
>And the signed contract can be found at:
>
>  http://www.icann.org/general/iana-contract-09feb00.htm
>
>Let me know if you have any comments.
>
>Thanks,
>Kim
>

--- jerry at fc.net
Failure is a natural consequence of any nonscalable activity. -- Paul Vixie