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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."
Judges are ignorant.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
This is like taking your home address with you, when you move.
"But I want to live on 115 Baker Street". How can a judge get that dumb.
nosig today
Unlike the whole "keep your cell-phone number" jiberjoo, this is unneeded and will do nothing but break the internet, will it not?
Isn't the whole DNS system set up to avoid the need to keep your numeric address? I mean, it's irrelevant if it only takes 5 minutes for my new IP to propogate.
Oh well, I hope this breaks the internet. I'm sick of the internet.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
... but you don't want to pay for it. Take my word for it.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
This really shows the need for more technology savvy judges.
I imagine the thought process was something like: "Hey, if we can have cell number portability, why can't we have IP address portability? Same thing, right?"
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
This will surely be compared to WLNP, but its different in one key way. The internet has a built in system that alleviates the need for IP Portability, that system is called DNS. Regardless of how many times you change IPs, your domain name can remain constant.
Lets pray the courts don't start setting technical policy more than they already are. How long before I have to enter my MAC address at every console just to make sure any random ARP packets intended for a machine I was just at still get to me here?
Josh
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Matters relating to the internet should be outside the jurisdiction of such judges. The internet isn't a local thing, it crosses national borders. Allowing any non-global entity to pass judgement on a portion of the internet is one step towards fragmentation.
And talk about turn the DNS system into a tangled weave of crap. This type of thing will completely nullify the idea of ip-address ranges.
To be honest, I was half-way afraid the Slashdot crowd would hail this ruling as a strike for the "little guy", but of course most of us are at least a little more technically savvy than the average judge... I think that it is probable (and clearly this is the case with the Judge) that most people think of IP addresses like phone numbers, which of course is not the case.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
How stupid can these courts get? Why on earth would someone need to take their IPs with them? If they've configured things such that they're dependent on a certain IP, they obviously have very incompetent system s staff.
This is what DNS is for, so you can plunk any IP in and have it resolve properly.
Some idiot probably hired a bunch of idiots to migrate their web site to a new provider, they probably fucked DNS to hell, the idiot probably demanded that the ISP just allow them to take the IP address and be done with it. In the meantime, the idiot went out of business because his site was down, and the ISP that said "you're crazy we can't do any of this!!" gets blamed.
If the ISP is in another state they would be attempting to regulate interstate commerce, and even within their own state they are not the governing body assigning IP addresses.
It would be like the state government voiding FCC rules and telling a radio station they could keep their "WKRP" station title even if the federal government was doing the licensing.
There is no mention of the size of the customers IP range. For all we know it could be a /16, which while in itself would be strange (non portable /16, unheard of), it wouldn't be a techinical problem.
Anything down to about a /23 wouldn't be a major issue. 55% of routes in the globabl BGP table are /24s, an extra /23 would barely register.
If its a /24 or less, then the judge needs to be hit with a clue stick.
Whatever happens, its going to change the definition of "public share resource" forever. Honestly, the someone needs to explain to the judge that IP space is not owned, it is (for lack of a better word) leased to the user.
I'm getting off my high horse now before....
It's still ridiculous that the judge doesn't have enough brains to toss the case right out. The numeric address space belongs to NAC, a domain name (if registered) belongs to the plaintiff.
Like another poster said, this is like wanting to keep your street address and zip code when you move across country. Imagine how well the mail system would work when my address is "129 main st, smalltown PA 21132" and I live in an igloo in Alaska.
Obviously he doesn't know how TCP/IP works, how the IP address space is organized, or what DNS is (your DNS domain name is your "address", not your dotted-quad IP).
It's dangerous having these jokers ruling on cases like this. Small-time judges like this one tend to have a god-complex, and just love the chance to legislate from the bench.
The upside is, if he pulls it off, it'll give the RIAA a hell of a time trying to subpoena ISPs for information based on IP. They'd have no way to know who owns which address.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
> if this ruling stands and a new precedent is set, any customer of any
> carrier would be allowed to take their IP space with them when they leave
> just because it is not convenient for them to renumber.
Umm... isn't this alarmist? If this were established as a precedent (which it's not) it is a state court ruling... aren't state courts reluctant to accept other states' courts rulings as precedent?
Ok, he takes a block of IP addresses, and connects to his new ISP. Surprise, nothing works!He calls the ISP and they laugh. He sues, and a different judge rules he can't force the new ISP to use his old IP addresses.
So a block of IP addresses is gone permanently from the internet. Well, at least until overturned on appeal. At the moment, it's not much different from companies sitting on large blocks of addresses and refusing to give them up.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
This is only akin to telephone number portability if people needed to know what port to switch to at the company. You know like in the old days where they had actual plugs that they moved? DNS is the phone number, and it already is portable. That is the whole idea behind dynamic. Moving an IP is like keeping the port the phone company switches you to. It really is useless to anyone except the phone company or ISP in this case.
Theres no reason that a judge should be expected to understand DNS and the Internet routing, any more than you should understand property conveyance law.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
looks like the offtopic modder still had a point left for you... ;)
If average people cannot vote and decide about nuclear power, however uneducated they may be, who should decide?
If the average person has the power to vote for a leader, and that leader has the power to implement nuclear power, then there isn't much difference in putting anything to the vote.
The reality is, we have to respect everyones opinions for what they are, no matter how irrelevant they may be.
I agree with you though about the judge, in terms of law, this is about right and wrong, and in terms of is someone entitled to keep an IP address, isn't it simply a case that it never belonged to his ISP in the first place? only through licensing?
I thought ICANN had the final word?
Seems strange to me!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
As long a the plaintif coughs up the dough for additional routers to handle this idiocy, that's fine.
The sad thing is that they already _had_ their own IP space assigned to them, but (according to NAC, at least) were too lazy to migrate to it.
Why bother doing all that hard technical work when you can call your lawyers and force someone else to do it for you? All the cool kids are doing it.
It's temporary, to make sure neither party suffers to greatly until the Actual Judgement gets made.
Granted, it's not permanent, but here's judge's order, from the article: "NAC shall permit CUSTOMER to continue utilization through any carrier or carriers of CUSTOMER's choice of any IP addresses that were utilized by, through or on behalf of CUSTOMER under the April 2003 Agreement....
So NAC is required to allow this, regardless of how much grief it causes.
Sounds to me like someone took the concept of phone number portability and tried to apply it to another problem domain.
Actually not true since your IP will now be "static" and can be almost guaranteed to point to you. If anything this will make the RIAA's life easier since they will only need to do a name lookup against the DNS (or whatever protocol gets created to manage this) to find out who owns the IP.
Phone numbers are only portable to geographic areas if you move to another state you can't change to another provider and take your number with you. Obviously the people involved in the portability of phone numbers realized that area codes would be destroyed if they allowed transfer of the number anywhere. It seems like taking your IP with you would also be limited by the fact that IP's aren't portable by design and to move IP's would damage the integrity of the internet. I am not a lawyer but it seems the best way for the provider to fight this would be address the issue of IP addresses not being portable in design and would require restructuring the entire internet.
Its a little bit like phone numbers which are indeec portable, but only within a network.
(Try taking your phone number accross a country boundary for instance).
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Wrong. DNS names like Slashdot.org are like Phone numbers. You can redirect where they point to. IP's are like your house address. Try getting the post office to deliver to 1600 Pensylvania Ave, Washington DC, USA with the house in somewhere in Europe. Moving the IP's takes a change in the configuration of the internet routers.
Much different from cell phone number portability. When you want to call mom you key in a 7-10 digit address to ring mom's phone. Most users won't key in "mom". If mom changes her phone number she has to tell everyone her new number, so even if you set up a voice dialing entry, you're not isolated from having to know her number at least once so you can update your phone book entry.
However, when you want to do a keyword search do you type in 216.239.57.99 or do you type in google.com?
When you check your email do you type in 64.4.32.7 or do you type in hotmail.com?
When you want to look at porn do you type in 64.71.165.211 or do you type in thehun.com?
Have you *ever* seen those IP addresses before today? Probably not. You don't need to know them to reach them.
Do you have any idea that when you type in thehun.com, sometimes you see 216.218.206.40 and sometimes you see 64.71.165.211 and sometimes it's 216.218.255.232? Would you know if they changed? Would you know if there were a hundred of them? This stuff is kept hidden from you by DNS for a reason.
If a user ever needs to see an IP address, someone has done something wrong. The purpose of DNS is to make physical IP address assignments irrelevant.
And not only is it dumb, but it's extremely hard to do. IP address networks are segmented, and routers need to be able to rely on cases where it can say "Well, I don't know what's on the other end of this network, BUT I DO KNOW FOR A FACT THAT *THIS* END *ALWAYS* HAS ADDRESSES IN THE 216.139.128.x RANGE!"
Doing this will cause routing tables to grow exponentially if it continues unchecked, as it greatly reduces the hierarchical, logical nature of IP addresses and how they correspond to geographic providers of bandwidth.
This is bad, this is VERY BAD for the internet. I appreciate the person's concerns, but there is already a solution out there for portable addressing. It is known as DNS. They need to update their DNS records to point to new IPs from their new ISP, not strong arm their old ISP through the legal system into breaking the internet.
This is a failure of the legal system which will cause lasting damage to the internet, in my humble opinion.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
If this matter actually ends up in a permanent order requiring the IP space to be released, no prizes for guessing how long it will take for that block to be null routed by angry administrators everywhere.
Call me flaimbait, I don't care. That judge is beyond ignorant. The fact that this case even made it to court is disheartening. As stated previously, this is akin to demanding to have the same street address that you had at your last residence. I really don't understand the reasoning behind this. I hope this dies a quick death.
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
Until the early 1990s, anyone could get a block of IP addresses, and it was up to them how they got packets routed to them. This didn't scale well, and it's now virtually impossible. But that's just a result of technical decisions made over the last 10 or 15 years - and they could have been made differently - so there's no reason to expect a judge to be familiar with that. It's certainly
not as obvious or clear-cut as a physical address or even a post code.
Presumably as the case proceeds good technical arguments will be made and the temporary order lifted.
A dns entry is more like a telephone number and that is what should be used for portability. A phone switch can get a local routing number for any dialed number. There is not really any way for a router to do the same for individual addresses in a reasonably efficient way.
This is a temporary order by the judge and I'm sure once he has a chance to understand the technical and logistical issues the correct decision (non-portability of ipv4 addresses) will be made.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
See, it makes sense to be able to take your cell phone number with you, because people actually use that number. But with internet addresses, it's usually by DNS entry, and your IP address can even be completely dynamic. Therefore, there's no reason to take your IP address with you, especially since it'll screw up internet routing.
What's really scary about IP allocation is how many individual corporations have so many IPs.
It might seem reasonable for IBM and Apple to have an entire Class A, but why do Ford, Eli Lily, Halliburton, Prudential, GE, and Merck have entire Class A IP blocks when they're not using a fraction of them??? The IP allocation list reads like a who's who of political favors.
So what's the big deal? Sure, the customer in question has a severe case of recto-cranial inversion. But why is everybody saying that this TRO heralds the doom of the route tables?
The judge doesn't know the technical issues, so he's issued the TRO to keep things static until he can examine everything and issue a ruling.
Note that the judge isn't insisting that the customer be able to take his numbers, just that the ISP can't prevent it. In other words, they can't BGP-advertise those numbers, or sell them to another customer, etc. The judge is just asking (okay, ordering) the ISP to set those IPs aside for the time being. If the customer can find somebody who'll advertise 'em, then that's fine too.
In a little while, the judge will have studied the situation, and gotten amicus curiae briefs, and probably expert testimony, and will issue a fair ruling (which, I expect, will tell the customer to go away and quit whining about his IPs). But for him to be fair in his ruling, he has to make sure that those IPs aren't recycled first, and that's why he issued the TRO.
The article makes it sound like the judge ruled that the IPs are portable; even the subject says it: "Can a Customer take their IP's with them? (Court says yes!)". The article talks about this as a ruling that may set a precident. It's just a TRO; the judge is putting the brakes on things until he can figure out what's what. There's no ruling, there's no precident, and I expect everything will go back to normal soon.
Think about it: We all fought for cell phone number portability, but we hate IP number portability.
To the average non-technical person, wouldn't they seem to be a similar right? More importantly, shouldn't we be able to keep IPs? So lazy ISPs have to rewrite software due to lazy Admins... It's a similar right, so if I pay for a static IP, I pay for a static IP.
Perhaps the current economic model and technology behind IP routing is flawed in this respect, but does that really mean that they should be, in fact, locked in? It's a pain to change DNS info. What if you are a site owner but not the admin? What if it's some long gone web design firm? Can the average user really change an IP address, even using most registrar's friendly web interfaces?
This is amazing. We're shouting the same problems that cell phone companies did - too great an expense, need time, not set up for it, unnecessary - but only because it is convenient.
Why even bother arguing a point when you contradict yourself on a mostly parallel point?
I imagine this will start drawing flames, but it's an important point at how hypocritical we, in the technical community, have become when we go from end-user asking for a service to admin denying a similar service. It's just my two cents, so if you don't like it, give me a refund. I'll be waiting.
Well, I started to read through the court documents, and it looks so far like the ISP who gets to keep the addresses (courtesy of the order) actually has some really serious complaints against its upstream provider, which is why the court had to take some sort of immediate action.
Technically, I understand the knee-jerk response that's all /. seems to cover so far.
But seriously -- what's the judge to do, when
the upstream ISP is doing stuff like that? They've
broken the contract so many times it's not funny,
and it seems like this is a pretty minimal step
towards letting the victim (== ISP that gets
to keep the address, per the order) get
disentangled from an especially crapulent
upstream provider.
Seems most of the /. crowd would
prefer that ISPs be given the kind of powers
that God-Emperor Bush seems to want,
to abuse anyone they see fit and never be
brought to account.
Come on people. Look at the facts.
Of all the posts in this thread, only about 5 have a clue what's going on here, the rest have been hysterical rants about how this is going to break the internet, screw over the defendant and other such nonsense.
The defendant was agressively trying to steal this guys business which he's actively trying to relocate, but the defendant is jerking him around and generally acting like an ass.
The TRO was both justified and reasonable. Temporary routings are typical when a large netblock user moves to a new provider.
This guy was more then willing to continue paying them for the redirect service and had negotiated several times with them on contract terms which the defendant agreed to, then completely rewrote when they penned the agreement.
Complete jerk is what I'd call the defendant.
If you actually go and read the filed papers:
plaintiff is an ISP, and defendant is also an ISP, and was providing facilities and IP addresses to plaintiff, but did try some intimidation manoeuvers or else to gain some of plaintiff's business (well in any case relationship degraded)
plaintiff is moving out and wants to avoid defendant breaking down its business while the move is happening. (because relationships are sour and defendant would wreck the plaintiff's hosting business if it claimed back all IP addresses at once)
Also plaintiff is currently requesting IP addresses from ARIN, but the process is not immediate.
As duly noted in a former thread, it is a temporary restraining order.
To allow plaintiff to move its business and migrate, defendant is barred from withdrawing addresses at once (it is a matter of rerouting whole blocks of IP, not just one IP address).
Then again I just read plaintiff's case, but it shows the issue is more complex.
And it is not a story of "Poor John Doe wants to keep his 145.250.1.25 address, judge gives him the right to do so"
Xrissley
=====
I lie all the time, including now
It's more likely ignorance..
:)
Ping is a tool everybody knows, maybe because online games tend to use "ping" to rate network performance or maybe because of IRC.
Anyways, I guess they try it on their CLI and notice it tells you the IP of whoever you ping, and as it does the job they just use it.
I don't think it's a particularly bad thing either, the net can handle a few 64 byte long echo requests and their answers
-jmk