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

[Dick desJardins]

Well, first, the NSF is part of the Federal government.

My view is that the government owned the numbers to start,
but quickly created an open administration function that allowed
anyone to get numbers.  So very quickly the Internet community
got a lot of numbers, including your German example.  Now the
majority of the numbers have been allocated.  (Note that I'm
referring specifically to IPv4 addresses -- not to DSN domains
or IPv6 addresses or other numbers.  IPv4 addresses came
first, and were clearly the result of US Government funded
research.)

Maybe it's similar to the early US laws that gave land to
homesteaders.  After a time the homesteaders got clear title,
and they then owned that land.

Since the numbers were given away by a prototyping activity and
research project rather than by a legal process (law specifically
passed by Congress), with the intent to create the Internet
community as an open community (that is the way IANA was run
from the beginning, as history shows clearly), there is not much
"law" that applies.  My own view would be that it would be
impossible to coerce the German organization or in fact any
organization in the US or any other country to give back their
numbers -- therefore such discussion is moot.  Note that this does
not mean that at some future time the numbers might not be subject to
other evolution within the Internet community that would apply to all
numbers equally (whatever that might be -- the Internet has not
stopped evolving! :-)

Dick (my own views)
----

At 12:10 PM -0500 1/31/97, Valdis.Kletnieks at VT.EDU wrote:
>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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Dick desJardins
EOS Network Manager
GSFC Code 505, Greenbelt MD  20771
Phone 301-614-5329        FAX  -5267