Court Says Customers May Take IPs Away From ISP

Jeremy Kister writes "According to a post on the North American Network Operators Group mailing-list, The State of New Jersey has issued a temporary restraining order, allowing a former customer of Net Access Corporation (NAC) to take non-portable IP Address space (issued from ARIN), away from NAC." The post argues: "This is a matter is of great importance to the entire Internet community. This type of precedent is very dangerous. If this ruling is upheld it has the potential to disrupt routing throughout the Internet, and change practices of business for any Internet Service Provider."

Comments

OK.

[gowen]

Hands up who understands the legal concept of a temporary restraining order?

Answer : It's temporary, to make sure neither party suffers to greatly until the Actual Judgement gets made.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:they should get a clue

[davew]

The problem is that if IP addresses are well aggregated, all a BGP-speaking router (that's the big ones in the core) needs to know is "for this very large block of addresses, use interface A; for that very large block of addresses, use interface B; for this other very large block of addresses, use interface A again." That is your routing table, it takes processor time to traverse for every packet, and it's growing; and if sizeof(routing table)*sizeof(traffic throughput) grows faster than Moore's law, it gets rather troublesome for the internet.

If you route geographically or per end-user or (shudder) per person, the number of entries that your core router has to potentially traverse explodes. This is the essence of CIDR, and we have separate naming (i.e. DNS) and routing (i.e. IP addresses) specifically so that end users may have a portable name irrespective of the routing infrastructure.

In the phone system, where naming and addressing are both conflated into your phone number, it's a lot more painful. (All of a sudden there isn't a simple programmatic way of mapping a three-digit prefix to to the operator that will handle the call.)

The problem of routing table size remains regardless of the size of the IP space - IPv6 will solve a lot of problems, but this isn't one of them.

Re:they should get a clue

[Rik van Riel]

If the FCC suddenly said one day ok, people have to be able to take their IPs with them. ISPs would be pissed, but they'd probably all move to IP6 where its much more possible.

Please read RFC 2772. Having portable IP addresses the way you describe is explicitly forbidden with IPv6, for good technical reasons!

Re:It has to do with renumbering their network.

[Grizzletooth]

After reading the thread on NANOG you should have read the scanned case papers. Reads like a divorce proceeding. Lots of screaming and pointing out the other's failings.

From reading those, it is clear that the judge was making his decision not upon the technical merits/problems of portable IP space, but upon the claim by the customer that the ISP was trying to steal/wreck their business.

Re:IP and phone numbers

[Grotus]

If you actually read the TRO, you'll see that the plaintiff just wants the addresses for a limited time (ie, until he is done transitioning to the new IPs). And we aren't talking about a small chunk of addresses either, the plaintiff is a web-hosting company with around 400,000 IPs to transition.

The short version is that according to the plaintiff, the defendant got greedy, which prompted the plaintiff to attempt to take his business elsewhere. Again according to the plaintiff, the defendant made threats to hinder the transfer, which prompted this suit.

Not quite a cut-and-dried example of judicial idiocy.