[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[Spencer Dawkins]

Noel actually pointed to the interesting middle-of-the-road case, when I was 
looking at the extreme case, which is probably less interesting.

I was saying "nobody will route to you/nobody will accept traffic with your 
source addresses", and you could probably sue your first-hop Internet 
connection and make them route to you, and make them accept traffic with 
your source addresses, so problem solved ...

... until you send an HTTP request to a server in another country. The 
request gets there, the server does its thing and sends a response, and the 
server's first-hop Internet connection, who has never been sued and doesn't 
think your address range goes where you think it goes, drops the response on 
the floor.

You'd have to decide how well you want the address range to work, to decide 
whether this is worth chasing, I think.

Spencer

>    >> If you "use" that address range, but no one sends you traffic for 
> it,
>    >> and no one accepts traffic from you that uses it, what does "use"
>    >> actually mean?
>
>    > Perhaps it means that you sue someone to enforce your rights?
>
> Don't forget that due to the international nature of the Internet, you 
> might
> have to sue people in all sorts of jurisdictions if you resort to this
> approach...
>
> Suits over DNS entries have often worked when filed just in the US, 
> because
> ICANN, IANA, the main registry (VeriSign), many of the top-level servers, 
> etc
> are all here.
>
> Whether the 'sue someone' approach would work for addresses (i.e. whether 
> ISPs
> around the world would voluntarily follow the lead of a court order in any
> particular country, when it comes to entering routes in their routers) is 
> an
> interesting question...
>
> Noel