[ppml] The WIANA registry

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

>> They are trying to use it, not steal it.

>Which is what a car jacker might say.

>They have unilaterally asserted the use of 1.0.0.0/8, which according 
>to the _only_ authority used to date (the IANA) has been reserved since 
>1981.  By this unilateral assertion, they are attempting to remove that 
>address space from the pool of unallocated addresses without following 
>existing, published address allocation policies.

>This is theft.

I was under the impression that theft was the taking of valuable property 
belonging to someone else. This seems a lot more like homesteading to me.

In fact, in the UK where I live, it is legal in many places to move into 
an unoccupied and unsecured building and take up residence. It's called 
squatting and although many people don't like it it is not considered 
theft.

>> The RIRs no longer need to conserve IPv4 address space.

>This isn't about conserving address space or whether or not they are 
>using address space for a valid reason.  The Internet works because 
>most people see it is in their self-interest to cooperate.  Part of 
>this cooperation is to agree to use the Internet registry system 
>including the IANA as a meeting point to define global addressability. 
>The folks at WIANA have chosen to ignore this cooperative system for, 
>as far as I can tell, no good reason.  Perhaps you have different 
>information?

I'm an insider like you so I know that the WIANA people could have gone 
through IANA and gotten this done legitimately. But very few people are 
insiders. Most people haven't got a clue how the IANA and RIR system works 
because it is run by insiders for insiders. The whole system does not 
explain itself and does not welcome scrutiny.

Is it any wonder that these people went off on their own when their 
requests were met with bureaucratic brushoffs?

This may be news to you and the other insiders on this list, but the fact 
is that there is an awful lot of media coverage of the so-called rogue 
registries like Alternic out on the web. When someone attempts to find out 
how the system works, they are quite likely to run across knowledgeable 
authorities advising them to hijack the addresses they need. The whole 
registry system sits there and waits passively for customers to show up 
and when they go elsehere we complain loudly that they should be shopping 
in our stores because we have the one true monopoly...

Maybe we should be a little more proactive, especially on the education 
front. Then these things wouldn't happen.

But, fact is, this has happened. So now the question is how to react. My 
suggestion is that we move in to help these people get a legitimate 1/8 
allocation from IANA. The potential numbers of connections in a wireless 
mesh do justify a /8 and even if IANA wouldn't hand over the whole thing 
right off the bat, I'm sure that some conditions could be worked out under 
which a subset is handed over now and the rest reserved.

There is lots of address space out there; we don't need to be stingy with 
it.

--Michael Dillon