[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[Jack Haverty]

David - thanks!  It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Actually, this topic has come up before - almost 40 years ago, when
email was in its infancy. We had lots of conversations then about email,
what an address really was, etc.  It was annoying for people as they
left with their brand new degree to discover that they also lost their
identity - their email address on the ARPANet.  I used to be
jfh at mit-dms, but I lost that when I left MIT.

If I remember those ancient conversations, the situation you describe -
david at ISP1.co.il - would be characterized as a "in-care-of" mailbox.
I.E., you don't own the mailbox, that email address means "send to
david, in care of ISP1.co.il"  This is, from a legal/regulatory
perspective, a different kind of email address than a true personal
address which you own, and which is not permanently tied to an ISP.  An
in-care-of address is only valid for a specific period of time.  The key
design point is that there are different kinds of email addresses, with
different technical and legal characteristics.

Personally, I've solved the problem (for me at least) by simply getting
my own domain - "3kitty.org", which (I think) belongs to me.  At the
time we had three cats.  So my email address is inherently portable, and
I've taken it through a series of ISPs.

So, if a university simply facilitated its users to each get their own
domain name, e.g., david.sitman.il, you could move
"david at david.sitman.il" around at will, at least within IL.  Lots of the
tech-savvy crowd pretty much do this now.  If you're fast, maybe you can
snag sitman.il instead.

Before all of you other engineers flame at me, the above was my feeble
attempt at lawyer-speak.  Of course there are a few scaling problems if
suddenly a billion new domain names are registered.  Current mechanisms
might need a little tweaking...

Back in the 90s, I was involved in meetings with the US Postal Service,
who were trying to figure out their role in our brave new Internet
world.  We tried to convince them that they should step up and manage
email addresses, just as they do for physical addresses.  But the
addresses could be people, not just buildings or roles like "Customer
Service", and technologies such as digital signatures would verify
authenticity.  You would get your email address from them, and it would
be portable.   All email would in effect be "General Delivery", and the
postal system would keep track of where you wanted it delivered as you
moved around (this is the hard part, engineering-wise, but it's no worse
than cell phones).

Never happened though.  Perhaps the IL Ministry....?

/Jack


On Thu, 2010-10-14 at 18:27 +0200, David Sitman wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Oct 2010, Jack Haverty wrote:
> 
> [...]
> > It's not just IP addresses.  AFAIK, issues like "Email Address
> > Portability" haven't come up yet.  Who "owns" ernesto at cs.fiu.edu  ...?
> > The person?  The University?  The "owner" of the .edu domain?
> 
> This summer, the Ministry of Communications in Israel began considering a 
> change in ISP licensing which would require ISP's to support email address 
> portability, so if I were given the address david at ISP1.co.il, I could keep 
> this address when I leave ISP1 and move to a different ISP. Since the 
> Israeli universities have an ISP license, this has caused us quite a bit 
> of consternation.
> 
> David Sitman
> Tel Aviv University