Joe writes:

Then we have a technical, operational and _global_ issue being decided by a New Zealand court. This is worth avoiding at all costs.

While I'm not sure that court action should always be avoided "at all costs" (it's useful as a last resort), I think heading this off at the pass is a good idea. And we have to realise that legal issues will raise their heads -- it's no good coming up with a "technical" solution that can be contested in court, because sure as eggs somebody isn't going to like it. So a position that makes sense technically, contractually and legally needs to be developed. Legally speaking, policy documents from the APNIC (apnic-11) pertaining to the period when most 202/8 assignments were made imply that IP addresses are portable unless explicitly stated otherwise. "Stating otherwise" is an interesting point -- the NetGate contracts being waved around about this time quite explicitly stated that numbers belonged to NetGate -- thus anyone with 202/8 addresses assigned by Waikato U acting as an agent of NetGate after signing such a document have non-portable addresses. (This may be contestable regarding how Waikato's position was or wasn't represented to the end user, but at least there's a bit of paper as a starting point in the argument.) Addresses allocated via UoW prior to the NetGate would appear to me to fall into the "portable" category, since no policy statement was ever issued prior to or at the time of such assignments that contradicts the position stated in the apnic-11 document. (apnic-11 expired in mid '95, but the superseding document wasn't issued until mid '96, which itself doesn't appear to state a position on portability.) I think that adequately sums up the contractual situation, at least in broad terms. Someone tell me if they disagree with that. This I believe is a completely separate issue to the question of how to improve the aggregation of network addresses. /24 prefixes in old blocks are generally regarded as a fact of life, to be addressed as and when possible, but not an issue when addressing overall Internet routing table growth, since the number of these addresses is not increasing. It seems to me that the second side of the issue is whether an ISP can or should route a given address block; after all, it doesn't matter who "owns" the block, if their prospective ISP won't route the address they can't use it. On the other hand, that ISP may lose the business in favour of one that will route the address. So I think a common position on how to migrate users to provider addresses, taking into account the cost of renumbering has to be found, and it can't be a position based on "ownership". The third issue, is whether there is a place for NZ-based allocation of addresses. I'm rather in two minds about that -- I'm not sure NZ really has enough addressing activity to justify an NZ registry, but it still bothers me a little that IP addressing is controlled by an offshore organisation. Comments? -- don --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog