[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[Dave CROCKER]

On 10/12/2010 12:44 PM, Bill Woodcock wrote:
> On the contrary...  It has negative value.  Just as if everyone took their
> street numbers with them when they moved, and 125 Broadway were next door to
> 25337 El Camino Real and across the street from 17B Vine Terrace...  It would
> ruin the aggregation property of the system, which would remove all meaning.


While the technical aspects of your points are, of course, quite correct, I was 
trying to raise a different point.  (In general, I think that this discussion 
has been sidetracked by its overly-nuanced technical focus, given that the 
question was about legal and, therefore, business and marketing, issues.)

The point is that these tags have two kinds of functions, which can make 
discussion confusing.  One is the downward, technical side.  IP Addresses and 
street addresses really are addresses, in terms of providing topological 
addresses.  Telephone numbers used to be, but no longer are.  But this was not 
my point.

The upward aspect of these tags is that they are referents and it's often true 
that some referents are more appealing than others.  Even when telephone numbers 
were true addresses, some were more desirable than others and companies tried to 
get preferable ones.  And by the way, there was a degree of number portability 
even back then, albeit with serious geographic limitations.

That this latter aspect is in the 'identifier' realm and the form is in the 
'locator' realm is no doubt also true, but wasn't all that interesting to the 
specific point I was making, which was that these things tend to have 'value' 
and that features like portability are a virtue to that value.  (That they might 
be negatives in terms of the downward, locator-ish function is reality... for 
some of them).

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net