FCC and ARIN

[Michael Dillon]

On Thu, 27 Feb 1997, Carol Anne Cypherpunk wrote:

> This makes the most sense since I've started 
> reading this list.

The citizens of Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cuba, Haiti, The
Dominican Republic, Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Guatemala, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Guayana,
Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Agentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, South
Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and several others whose names I can't think of
offhand, think that FCC involvement in ARIN makes no sense whatsoever.

However, citizens of all those countries think that a collaborative effort
like ARIN is a very good idea indeed.

> What is an IP address really worth?

Not much. I manufacture IP addresses any time I need them (see RFC1918
for details).

> I can see paying the FCC for this number.
> I can see paying the Patent  and/or 
> Post offices for censored.org (and .web)

You can pay anybody you want including the panhandler with the large
orange cat who can be found sitting on the sidewalk next to the
newspaper boxes on Market St. at 4th St. in San Francisco. Next time I'm
in San Francisco I will make surte to pay him for my IP addresses if he
hasn't retired from the panhandling business already. But none of this is
terribly relevant to ARIN.

> But is this all an attempt to get the routings to kind of 
> be like zipcodes?

ARIN has nothing to do with Internet routing other than the need to be
fully aware of how the network operators do this. If you want to know more
about routing then go to http://www.nanog.org and have a look through the
many documents on that website.

> I will see how Minnesota reacts to having control of the *.*.mn.us
> IP adresses.

*.*.mn.us are domain names, NOT IP addresses.

> Thanks for getting to the heart of the matter. It makes it look
> more like an accounting chore. Which it really is, anyway.

Precisely. And chores don't get done unless someone accepts the
responsibility to get them done.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com