US CODE: Title 15, Chapter 1, Section 2.

[Valdis.Kletnieks at VT.EDU]

On Fri, 31 Jan 1997 09:58:44 -0400, Dick desJardins said:
> The IP address space itself belongs to the Federal government,
> I believe.  The fee is not for the address, the fee is for

Umm.. the Federal government owns it, or does the 'Federal government'
merely happen to be the body that delegated the administration of
said space to a body that people in other countries are willing to
listen to just because it's easier that way?

Note that there's a distinction here that makes a big difference if you
happen to live outside the US and/or its partially owned subsidiaries
Canada and Mexico.  There's a *big* moral and legal difference between
"The US Government owns the address space" and "The US government funded
the NSF, which delegated the paperwork handling to IANA, which everybody
else just decided to listen to merely because listening was more interoperable
than trying to use a competing registry (as the people who are trying to
start up an alternate DNS TLD are finding out).

I would *love* to see what legalistic maneuvers the "federal government"
would use to get a German TCP/IP user to return the integers he stole ;)
-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Engineer
				Virginia Tech


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