On 25 Nov 2004, at 18:19, Donald Neal wrote:
One simple answer is that it long has been, and before that was held by The University of Waikato. That Telecom hold a lot of New Zealand's address space isn't a new issue. (See, for instance, the archive for this list for June 1998.)
This came up back when I was working at CLEAR. At the time the problem that I had was that people from Telecom were contacting CLEAR customers and saying "you are using our addresses, and therefore need to renumber. Alternatively you can become Telecom customers, and avoid renumbering." We had a meeting at the cisco offices in Auckland (facilitated by Roger de Salis, if I remember correctly) where we agreed that Telecom should stop asserting "ownership" of those numbers, and stop contacting customers like that. Telecom attended the meeting. There was much nodding and agreement amongst all parties. [We also reached loose agreement at that meeting to carve up the historical NZGATE assignments into /19s, and give nominal authority over each /19 to the ISP who happened to have the most customers in it at the time. Andy should remember this; it was his idea, as I recall.] The disputed "NZGATE" blocks were inherited by Telecom by virtue of the fact that they "took over the NZGATE function". If I travel back in time and speak briefly with a CLEAR hat on, I might suggest that "took over the NZGATE function" might better be phrased as "became one of two companies providing international Internet transit to NZ at the NZIX". It's a matter of perspective, and it's not at all clear from my recollections that the Telecom view is the most reasonable one. When the addresses were assigned by NZGATE there was no suggestion that they were anything other than provider-independent, to be available for use by the people they were assigned to in perpetuity. If I was someone who had been assigned such addresses, I would strongly resist any attempt by APNIC to re-classify them as provider-aggregatable addresses of Telecom NZ. Call a lawyer. By any reasonable interpretation of events, they are NZ "swamp space" -- throwbacks to an older, less formal and unbureaucratic era. If the answer from APNIC is that "this is our policy, and we are membership-driven" then someone should ask APNIC exactly what clause of what policy allows them to impose new restrictions on the use of addresses which were assigned years ago without any. Joe