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

[Valdis.Kletnieks at VT.EDU]

On Fri, 31 Jan 1997 12:56:45 -0400, Dick desJardins said:
> Well, first, the NSF is part of the Federal government.

Very true.  But.. The Federal Communications Commission is
part of the federal government as well, and it does *NOT* claim
to "own" the radio frequency spectrum.  It merely allocated them
in a sane manner to prohibit interference.  

> 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

Umm.. that might be "your view".  The issue is, of course, what the
*lawyer's* and *courts* view is.  There's a lot of precedent for
viewing it as "allocation of a scarce resource", but I've yet to see
cited any segment of the US Code, or case law, or anything else, that
confers ownership of the IP address space on the federal government.
Of course, if somebody actually *does* produce such a citation, I'll
be more than willing to switch *my* view. ;)

> got a lot of numbers, including your German example.  Now the
> majority of the numbers have been allocated.  (Note that I'm

In actuality, I doubt that a "majority" have been allocated, given
that the last time I checked a few weeks ago, a *large* chunk of
the 1.x.x.x - 126.x.x.x range was allocated to "IANA Reserved".

The real issue is no longer "running out of address space", it's
how many tiny chunks the already allocated part is split into.
If the IP space was up to 80%, but CIDR both (a) lowered it to
only 400 globally known prefixes and (b) kept the growth rate down
to 1% a year due to continued aggregation, we'd have no issues here.
If on the other hand it was "30% allocated and broken up 50,000+ ways"
(the actual situation currently), we'd be looking for a solution....

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Engineer
				Virginia Tech


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