[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[John Day]

I see nothing wrong with this language.  Qwest is 
the one assigning addresses so that it can use 
them to route.  If anyone "owns" the addresses, 
it is the entity assigning them to facilitate 
routing in its domain.

To take our street analogy earlier, the "owner" 
of street addresses is the City.  It administers 
the registry and when a new building is created 
it decides what number it should get to be 
consistent with previous assignments.  It "owns" 
the address space.

It is administering it so that people and those 
providing services can find the building with the 
address.  In rural Illinois a few years ago, 
there was a major effort to assign addresses to 
homes in the "country" i.e. not in any town, for 
911 purposes so that police and fire depts could 
be directed to an emergency.  Previous to this 
there had been no formal addressing.  (The locals 
just knew where everyone lived. "O, that is the 
old Garrett place" that sort of thing went on. 
;-) But with county wide dispatching it needed to 
be regularized.)  The county owned the address 
space.

If Qwest at some point wanted to re-shuffle its 
use of addresses that make routing "better" that 
would be its prerogative.  Of course it would 
want to weigh disruption to customers, but it is 
still its business to do that.

In the Internet case, since we have to do 
provider based addressing, Qwest corresponds to 
the City or County.

I see nothing inconsistent with the language of 
the contract and it seem completely in keeping 
with what we would intend.

Take care,
John

>As a follow up - ::wearing lawyer hat::
>
>Language in law is important, and nowhere is that more evident than in
>contracts and contract clauses.
>
>To give you an idea of the pervasive 'misunderstanding' that legal folk
>currently have with regards to IP addresses and their 'property
>interest'/status, here is an actual subpart from a contract Qwest signed
>with salesforce.com which is *listed on Westlaw as a model contract for
>telecommunications services*
>
>I.8. Rights and Obligations of Qwest; Disclaimer of Warranties
>
>
>(a) As may be set forth in the Addendum, Qwest will secure domain names
>and assign IP address space (subject to reasonable availability) for the
>benefit of Customer during the Term, and Qwest will route those addresses
>on Qwest's network; it being understood and agreed that neither Customer
>nor any of its “Users” (as defined in the AUP) shall have the right to
>route these addresses. Customer understands and agrees that it shall have
>no ownership interest in any IP address which Qwest obtains on Customer's
>behalf and that Qwest shall retain ownership of all such IP addresses, and
>upon termination of the Agreement, Customer's access to and utilization of
>such IP addresses shall terminate.
>
>"ownership" is not defined anywhere else in the contract.
>
>Maybe we should put together some workshops.
>
>=)
>
>Ernesto Rubi
>Network Engineer
>FIU / AMPATH
>Email:  ernesto at cs.fiu.edu