[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[John Klensin]

On 10/12/10, Ernie Rubi <ernesto at cs.fiu.edu> wrote:
> Sorry to belabor the point, but:
>
> Do you remember who decided the space and who employed that person(s), where
> it was decided (at work, at home)?
>
> Were you and Mr. Postel's actions under the control/direction of the US
> Government or a agency of said gov't at the time?
>
> I know these questions seem silly and perhaps intrusive but I'm trying to
> tie some of this to the law of agency.

Ernie,

I won't claim this answer is authoritative in any way, but we've had
this sort of discussion too many times, with now several generations
of law students or scholars wanting to generate theses, write books,
promote particular theories, or otherwise find retroactive
explanations for a lot of the Internet's origins and mechanisms.  From
my point of view (and I am not an engineer), they have all been
unsatisfactory to a greater or lesser degree because someone ultimate
seized on a theory and tried to force the facts and circumstances to
fit.   Maybe you will be the one who gets this completely right, but
you should forgive a certain level of skepticism and impatience based
on prior experience.

There are a few things you should probably understand to put things in context.

First, [D]ARPA almost never (perhaps never) handled its own
contracting and contract administration.  They issued "orders" to
other agencies to set up and manage the contracts.  Most technical
oversight  (such as it was) came from [D]ARPA staff, but there was
generally not very much of that at any sort of detailed level.

Second, at least with regard to topics related to Information
Technology (including the ARPANET/Internet work) during that period
[D]ARPA was very much in the "advanced research" business.  Contracts
and grants usually more closely resembled "take these resources, apply
them in this general direction, and see if you can produce something
useful" rather than "execute this particular set of tasks".

In that context, IP addresses (and ARPANET IMP and host numbers before
them) aren't assets in any sense that would align with the questions
you are trying to ask.  They are just identifiers that are
consequences of the design of the protocols (IPv4 in this case).  They
are necessary to reaching one host from another because one has to
have some uniform mechanism for talking about those hosts (and the IP
specification defined that mechanism in terms of addresses and
specified the format of the addresses).  That, in turn, created a
situation in which it was necessary to have a registry of addresses in
use on what we would now call the public Internet in order to preserve
uniqueness.  Creating that registry, and assigning addresses on
request, didn't need to be a big deal, a separate contract, or a
transfer of authority: it just needed to be done as a necessary part
of having IP[v4] work in practice.

>From that perspective, "who owns IPv4 addresses" can end up sounding a
lot like "who owns SMTP (or email address syntax) and grants me the
'right' to use it". I'll come back to that analogy in a moment.

It is also relevant that once one starts using an address that will be
used by other hosts, changing it ("renumbering") is a PITA.  How much
of a PITA has varied over time as different mechanisms have come into
being and the complexity of the networks making up the Internet has
evolved.   But it has never been completely trivial and doing so
imposes costs on whomever is doing the renumbering.  That observation
creates a situation that you may find unusual at first glance: someone
can say "ownership is irrelevant and not an issue" in one sentence and
"no one has the right to take this address away from me and force me
to renumber, at least without compensating me.for the costs" in the
next and be perfectly consistent.

Coming back to the email example,  if you obtain email service from me
and ask for a particular local-part of the mailbox name (the stuff
left of the "@") and I register it for you, you probably don't "own"
the address.  Maybe I'm leasing it to you (certainly some service
agreements have been drawn that way), maybe not, but, if you stop
using my service, your rights to receive mail at that address vanish.
Nonetheless, if I then reassign that address to someone whose goal is
to collect and use mail that was intended for you, you may have some
cause for complaint so I can't really claim I completely own it
either.

I hope that helps... at least with your understanding of why you
aren't going to get the crisp and simple answer you are looking for.

    john