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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."
Now I can be banned from Slashdot wherever I go!
Je t'aime Stéphanie
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!!!!
Reminds me of "average" people voting regarding nuclear power...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I don't understand why this was in a court. What use is this to the person that filed the suit. It can't work. Is this just an asshole with a axe to grind who found a stupid/ignorant judge?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
... 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.
In other news, the U.S. Post Office is letting users keep their zip codes when they move.
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I haven't RTFA yet, but is there any proposal in how this is supposed to happen?
~S
Full article text - minus karma whoring.
There has been a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) issued by state court
that customers may take non-portable IP space with them when they leave
their provider. Important to realize: THIS TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER HAS
BEEN GRANTED, AND IS CURRENTLY IN EFFECT. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT COULD
HAPPEN, THIS IS SOMETHING THAT HAS HAPPENED. THERE IS AN ABILITY TO
DISSOLVE IT, AND THAT IS WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO DO.
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.
In the TRO, the specific language that is enforced is as follows:
"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 during the term thereof (the "Prior CUSTOMER Addresses") and
shall not interfere in any way with the use of the Prior CUSTOMER
Addresses, including, but not limited to:
(i) by reassignment of IP address space to any customer;
aggregation and/or BGP announcement modifications,
(ii) by directly or indirectly causing the occurrence of
superseding or conflicting BGP Global Routing Table entries; filters
and/or access lists, and/or
(iii) by directly or indirectly causing reduced prioritization or
access to and/or from the Prior CUSTOMER Addresses, (c) provide CUSTOMER
with a Letter of Authorization (LOA) within seven (7) days of CUSTOMER's
written request for same to the email address/ticket system
(network@nac.net), and (d) permit announcement of the Prior CUSTOMER
Addresses to any carrier, IP transit or IP peering network."
We believe this order to be in direct violation of ARIN policy and the
standard contract that is signed by every entity that is given an
allocation of IP space. The ARIN contract strictly states that the IP
space is NOT property of the ISP and can not be sold or transferred. The
IP blocks in question in this case are very clearly defined as
non-portable space by ARIN.
Section 9 of ARIN's standard Service Agreement clearly states:
"9. NO PROPERTY RIGHTS. Applicant acknowledges and agrees that the
numbering resources are not property (real, personal or intellectual) and
that Applicant shall not acquire any property rights in or to any
numbering resources by virtue of this Agreement or otherwise. Applicant
further agrees that it will not attempt, directly or indirectly, to obtain
or assert any trademark, service mark, copyright or any other form of
property rights in any numbering resources in the United States or any
other country."
[ Full ARIN agreement http://www.arin.net/library/agreements/rsa.pdf ]
Further, it is important to realize that this CUSTOMER has already gotten
allocations from ARIN over 15 months ago, and has chosen not to renumber
out of NAC IP space. They have asserted that ARIN did not supply them with
IP space fast enough to allow them to renumber. Since they have gotten
allocations from ARIN, we are confident they have signed ARIN's RSA as
well, and are aware of the above point (9).
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. That could be a
single static IP address for a dial-up customer or many thousands of
addresses for a web hosting company. This could mean that if you want to
revoke the address space of a spammer customer, that the court could allow
the customer to simply take the space with them and deny you as the
carrier (and ARIN) their rights to control the space as you (and ARIN)
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.
If this kind of ruling is upheld, look for public IP's to disappear and for ISP's to provide private IP's or at a bare minimum to do away with statics.
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
Anybody in that judge's hometown that can give him a cluestick for the 4th of July? It's almost like he thought:
"Huh. IP Address. 172.24.50.24. Huh. Looks like a phone number! Aha! IP Number thingies make people able to call this guy's computer. Hot diggity, it's a phone number, I'm going to get my name in some law books! HEeeeeeyawwww!"
(Ok, so I don't really know if the judge grew up in [redacted], but still.. geeez)
Next thing you know we'll be taking our postal mailboxes with us.
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.
http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras/nac-case/
Some information for you!
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.
Well if you consider that recently cell phone numbers have become portable between different cellular carriers, then it seems this judge is just thinking "Hmm, IP addresses are a bunch of numbers... must be like cell phone numbers except for computers..."
Imagine how well the Post Office would work if everyone could take their street address with them when they move.
Not just their house number... Their entire address, including State and Zip Code.
Soon you'd have CA addresses in DC, DC in WA... Nothing would work.
This is exactly the same thing.
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
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....
This is NOT like moving the physical address of a house, its like transfering your cell-phone number from one supplier to another, the phone numbers is actually a virtual address there are network specific addresses that DON'T get transfered. Now part of the issue here is that DNS resolves as a hierachy based on the "."s in the addresses. This means that really the domain name is equivalent to the phone number. But the connection address is actually a MAC Address so maybe we should consider the IP address to be the virtual address that can be changed.
Transfering IP addresses is a matter of DNS configuration, what this would require is old ISPs to contain references to the new ISP for the old IDs. Is that really so technically difficult ? There are many unanswered questions here but I'm not sure there is anything that is as significant an impact as is claimed.
It is NOT like moving a house address, because that is a physical address in a physical network, like MAC. IP and DNS are VIRTUAL addresses on a virtual network.
If phone companies do it, why shouldn't ISPs ?
And think about this when the world goes IPv6, no worry about running out of numbers, but do you want to re-programme your internal house network when you move ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Assuming this doesn't happen to whole IP ranges, won't IPV6 lessen the potential impact of this?
One or two small subnets off the huge amount that will be available doesn't seem so bad, and could spur some interesting development/business plans.
Just a thought.
~G
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
> 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?
This is just another example of attorney's taking advantage of Judge's being malinformed on current technologies. I'd like to see them start advertising /30's on the backbone. Since they don't, should be interesting to see how this customer can take an IP with him, considering that the IP addresses aren't owned, they are assigned. Therefore there can never be a conveyance of ownership.
It isn't really that crazy.
:-)
:-)
IP addresses are like phone numbers. Except on the other end, there can be anything. In fact the Internet used to run by dialing the exact computer you wanted to talk to didn't it? Or was that pre-Internet? I am too young to remember
I say we hope he is a bit slow, and let him keep 1 class B and on class D address, two for the price of one.
May I recommend 192.168.*.* and 127.0.0.1
He can have them!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
You people who demanded cell phone number portability started this precedent. This is exactly what I was alluding to when I posted this and this. The second post better explains my point.
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.
I can just imagine what the routing [IPv4] tables would look like. It's bad enough _now_ as it is. Time for everybody to upgrade their memory otherwise...
:). Sure, some DNS servers won't honor my short timeout setup, but usually within 24 hours the new information has propagated the Internet as needed.
... can you imagine what the telco's are going through in figuring out routing tables now? Something like this could finally melt the Internet. And ironically my phone line. :)
Is IPv6 routing at the core level any more efficient? Or would this just aggravate this problem?
This is ridiculous -- I've switched core ISP's multiple times for various reasons. The sad thing is reverse lookup on a few very old IP's are still unchanged (and I've even sent them reminders over the years [!]). I've been through controlled migrations where nobody notices anything to cut and switch botch jobs and have had little issue flipping DNS servers over to new IP's (I've always served myself at work, home, other offices I've set up, etc
I've never been willing to pay what it costs to own my IP block or even [!] a single address. I'm not Motorola or Apple and what's the problem with "renting" my IP much like I've only been able to do in the past with my [US] phone number? I love the fact that I was able to port my 20 year home phone line to VoIP -- and because of it dialing in the future will become very interesting. Am I in LA? Chicago? New York? For the poor sap -- is my next call local, long distance, band-b, band-c and what will it cost? Now off-topic and I digress...
Hopefully the courts don't see phone number portability as precedence
It is not impossible, few things are, but it would require a significant investment in time, money, and new software for every backbone provider.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
One reason it is different is that the common names (domain names) are portable. Another may be infrastructure though I think that phone numbers were not designed to be easily switchable between phone companies so as far as that argument goes it might be a wash.
In the end I don't think there is as compelling an argument for ip porability as there was for phone number portability since the IP is not exactly your identity on line whereas your phone number is very definitely your phone identity.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
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.
However, this became a big problem as the Internet grew and grew, and the BGP tables grew and grew, so finally companies stopped doing this, and now IP ranges are considered to be not portable unless they're a certain size. `CIDRize or die' was the saying ... and people chose not to die.
The court needs a clue though. As does the customer who asked for the TRO -- they'll find that many (most?) ISPs will not route to their IP range at their new ISP, in spite of what the court said. I guess their old ISP could set up a VPN for them, but I'm guessing they won't.
Not.No, judges are not simply ignorant because they haven't been studying computers and using the internet for the past 10 years. Judges must work within the boundaries of the law, and in many cases, the law is not equipped to deal with modern circumstances such as IP addresses. I didn't get a chance to look into the details of this yet, but neither did the judge. That's why he issued a temporary restraining order, and not a permanent decision.
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.
When asked what exactly it was then, he said it was 'an exit circular with many lanes' (exact quote - we're talking about the exit of J29 M1 for any UK readers). When asked to point out where, in the Highway Code, 'an exit circular with many lanes' was defined he refused to comment and suggested we move on. Since the entire case was that someone had incorrectly changed lanes on a roundabout without indicating in time, thus smashing into the rear left-hand side of me, 'moving on' was rather difficult as everything was based around the fact it took place on a roundabout.
The guy in question fulfilled all the cliches - an impossibly Oxford Don-type accent which was obviously put on (I know some Oxford dons, and besides this guy came from Mansfield which has a totally different accent), absolutely smug in his self-delusion of superiority...the works.
When my solicitor apologised for losing the case afterwards, my comment to him was "Don't worry. My no claims bonus is unaffected, it's a nice sunny day, and I've managed to see purest legal farce in action. I'm still happy".
I learned to never underestimate legal stupidity that day.
Cheers,
Ian
Not about everything. They know tons about politics and law, but the country's past the point where these types can make wise decisions about this kind of case.
As a Libertarian (US), I almost shudder to think of adding the government, but maybe it would be worth it to have an agency tied into the court system for technology cases - almost the way the family court system does so. The problem is that there's an implication that the government would have authority over the internet itself. The truth is that they have do have power in cases like this.
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
This is absurd. It undermines the basic principles that led the internet grow up to the currect scale. Those who understand BGP and AS-es as well as Provider Independent and Provider Aggregatable Ip space, know this is the end. And the BGP tables are growing faster than most routers can hold anyway. No more soft inbound I quess... ;-)
So whats next? I would like to have the .com domain structure... or what the heck, give me the root (.)
-- for undocumented cisco commands, take a peek @ dotu
>> No, judges are not simply ignorant
Definition: Ignorant
1. Lacking education or knowledge.
2. Showing or arising from a lack of education or knowledge: an ignorant mistake.
3. Unaware or uninformed.
Well looky here, the judge IS ignorant. He could have done some research before throwing something like this out, but he choose not to.
As covered by NPR
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.
Your argument doesn't make sense. The web address is completely different from the IP address.
The problem is that IP addresses need to be assigned in blocks to keep the size of a full routing table down. Basically this ruling is nothing more than an indirect Internet Tax. The result of this ruling will be that backbone providers have to raise service rates to support the increased memory and processor requirements of their routers.
The size of a BGP routing table was skyrocketing until about 5-7 years ago. That's when groups like ARIN started saying, "we have to fix this".
The way to fix it is a logical method of subnetting. Big Blocks assigned to backbone providers...Smaller blocks within those assigned to the ISPs that connect to them...a few subnets givent to the customers that connect to them. If you move, you get new addresses. DNS solves all the problem of moving except the internal cost to readdress your machines. If your intelligent, you use DHCP for everything but servers so most of the work is easy. If your even more intelligent you run 95+% of your devices on internal addresses and NAT at your gateway so the work is even easier.
The problem is that users and some stupid programmers don't want to do what makes sense (utilizing DNS and NAT properly).
Plain and simple this ruling is ridiculous. Someone should buy this Judge, and more importantly, the fool that filed the complaint and his lawyer a copy of DNS for dummies.
...it looks like they may have actually tried. D'oh! Didn't see that little paragraph in there.
Though the claim about the Alabama state legislature is pure nonsense, it is similar to an event that happened more than a century ago. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate.
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!
I don't know what all the fuss is about, I've taken 127.0.0.1 with me wherever I go for years ;)
Philip
Signatures are broken
Research? How much research did you do on it? 2 seconds of reading comments on Slashdot? I know that's all I've done, and I'm willing to admit it, and give the judge the benefit of the doubt. S/He's issued a temporary restraining order in this case. Are you ignorant to the fact this means that the case is still open and under review? Would the judge not also be ignorant if he just threw the case out without looking at it closely enough? Generally, a restraining order prevents any further damage from being committed while the case is under review. Yes, it may be true that the complainant has no legal argument, but in our legal system we give a benefit of the doubt to victims and complainants. The judge in this case took a quick look at the facts, thought the case had some merit, and decided to take a closer look at it.
I spent half my day yesterday reading the NANOG thread related to this. Knew I should have submitted it. =)
Anyways, the customer wanted to avoid renumbering their network computers. Their argument was that there is a significant amount of inconvenience involved in renumbering their network. (Yes, we all know how easy it would be to use a NAT. The judge obviously does not.) The original NANOG discussion started here.
I think they were also leveraging a supposed anti-competitiveness nature to non-portable IP space. Yes, that's right. One of a bajillion ISP's is hurting competition by following the globally accepted rules of the Internet that is the foundation of CIDR.
--LordPixie
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.
The Plaintiff isn't trying to get class Cs from the ISP. The ISP allegedly imposed unreasonable payment terms and is threatening to cut off the plaintiff's access to the IPs. The plaintiff is fighting for the right to have uninterrupted access to that IP range while he moves his servers from said ISP to a new physical location and new IP range.
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.
I'm thinking of moving from New York to California, and I'd like to take ALL my information with me, including:
my home IP address
my telephone numbers, including area code
my full mailing address
my global coordinates (latitude and longitude)
and my land (physical property). What's the address of this judge? I need to go talk to him.
The company in question is Pegasus Web Technology run by a Mr. Jason Silvergate.
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
If you want to compare it to having a phone, it's like moving from the southern US with a landline phone number of (233) 123-2321, and wanting to keep it in an area that is not serviced by 233.
Actually, moreso it's like moving to China, but still wanting to have your number be the exact same (country code and all).... after all, it too can be routed, nevermind that doing so for too many people will be incredibly slow/stupid/etc
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company that
claimed 2 class B address ranges. They moved
them from ISP to ISP.
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.
All I've seen is a message NAC posted to a message board and very little else. Chances are NAC submitted it to Slashdot as well.
Unless there's a gag order (not mentioned, and if there was they probably couldn't publicize it as much as they have) there's no reason not to link to the actual court order and other details.
For all we know someone set us up the bomb by giving very specific, but obviously lacking breadth, information and letting us come to the obvious conclusion.
This is basic marketting (astroturfing) to try and get the outcome changed by technical people (who think they know what's going on) who the court might listen to.
It's in our best interest to completely vet out the case before running off half cocked. I wish I knew enough to find the TRO or the customer's side of the story.
The facts seem clear enough, but the presentation is muddy at best.
-Adam
In some ways I'm not sure how this is different on the surface from cell phone number portability.
The big difference is that phone companies don't buy their phone numbers off the government, whereas ISPs do pay for their IP ranges. Ignoring the technical side of things (block routing), this would be equivalent to a customer switching his car rental from Hertz to Avis, but insisting that he be able to take the same physical car with the other "provider". Even worse, in fact, since the car in question is the property of the rental agency, which could make a deal to sell it to the competition, whereas an IP range is only leased by an ISP and can't be resold.
#!/usr/bin/english
No, it won't help. With either IPv6 or IPv4, you still need the global routing table entries. That's where the problem is. The global routers will say something like 1.2.3.0/24 are routed to some network equipment in New Jersey. With this ruling, those same global tables in all those routers need to add another entry for a particular IP address in that range to instead go to some other providor. Now imagine if everyone kept their own personal IP address. Those tables wouldn't be able to cleanly route chunks of the IP address space to the ISPs using them, but instead must be filled with tons and tons of rules for individual addresses.
IPv6 works in a very similar fashion. The only difference between IPv6 and IPv4 in terms of the routing is that the address ranges/chunks are much more abundant and much larger. If anything, IPv6 will make it flat out impossible for the Internet to work if people keep personal IP addresses, because there is no possible way the routers could handle the mapping tables.
Ranges need to be kept to individual ISPs as they are now. AT&T leases a big chunk of several billion IPv6 addresses and then assigns those as they see fit to their customers and internal network equipment. All the global routers need to know then is that any address in that chunk AT&T leases just gets routed along to AT&T's network. If a customer leaves AT&T, they need to get an IP address in the range of their new ISP. Otherwise, the new ISP needs to add tons of special routing rules to their equipment, AT&T needs to add tons of special routing rules to their equipment, the backbones and global routers need special rules, anyone that has any rules regarding AT&T and/or the new ISP would need special rules added, etc.
Here's the affidavits stating the plaintif's claims in the case. Clearly this story involves more than just "some idiot wanting to keep his IP addresses".
UCI (the plaintiff) is a web-hosting company that has resold IP-space to its customeres. They don't seem to be looking to take the addresses permanently. They want to continue use of the address space at their new provider until they've finished migrating all of thier customers.
The plaintiff claims that once they rebuffed suggestions of a takeover from NAC (the ISP), the ISP started applying pressure on the plaintiff. Examples include claims that prices were raised (e.g., electricity charges are 60% higher than what the new ISP will charge), and payment terms were unilaterally changed.
This doesn't seem to be the slippery-slope case that will result in home users taking their IP addresses with them as they change ISPs.
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.
Your honor,
I am moving, please tell the govt to let me take my GPS co-ordinates with me!
doh...
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.
-Lucas
Haven't seen this mentioned here already, but a small update is that according to a later NANOG post, ARIN's legal eagles will be taking up this case.
This is good news.
This Just In:
The court has just declared that customers may also take their postal addresses with them when they move.
So now if your customers, friends, and relatives have come to know your address as "1010 Elwood Drive" and you move across town or to a new city, you can bring the address with you to avoid confusion! Isn't that great!?
Soon each building, or even each office or apartment within a building will have it's own completely unique address without regard to where it is physically located.
We should make judges and lawyers in charge of more things so we can get great conveniences like this in all our life!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
HOW temporary is it? How long will it take to arrive at a permanent decision? How about the appeals process? Will it be like this all the way to the Supreme Court?
Besides, what will the plaintif do with their address block? They can take the numbers with them, sure. But how will the judge order other networks to route traffic to those addresses? Does this judge think Taiwan and Germany are in his jurisdiction?
This judge is not only ignorant of technology, he is ignorant of legislation as well. Apparently he has never heard of international agreements.
Phone number portability is limited. For example, if I move from NY to CA I cannot port my NY phone number to my new CA address, because the phone system can't handle the routing. You can only port a number when switching from one carrier to another at the same location. Cell phones have different rules because they have an entirely different routing system.
As IP routing works today, IP address portability would cause an eventual breakdown of the system. And, from a practical standpoint, how much value is there in a particular IP address? Services are accessed by hostname and DNS not by IP address. Maybe some specialized application required the use of real IP's on the LAN, (instead of private RFC1918 addresses and NAT, as is now common practice), and so some pain would be incurred in changing static IP assignments on servers. But no way does this balance out the potential problems such a precedent would cause for the entire Internet as it works today.--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
IANAL, but
/32 increments, and indeed, a naive reading of the article might indicate that if I assign a client, and that client sues, the routing table of the internet might soon have 2^32 routes, and most routers crash.
1) the article seems to say a different thing than the actual TRO
2) I'll explain why if the court had ruled like the article said, we'd be in deep shit, and second, I'll document my understand of the TRO
The main difference is that your cell phone company can't lose your cell phone number without a major cause. ARIN can decide to remove any number at its wish, meaning that someone could go to court, trying to block an ARIN reassignment from Provider ISP, even if they are the CAUSE of that reassignment. Say if client is not using 80% of its space, and ARIN, who granted that space(ARIN may grant space in many forms, but most ISPs prefer contiguous blocks, for routing reasons.), then when the Provider notifies the client that they messed up, asking for too large a block from them, the client could try to sue, thereby interfering with the priorly business-as-usual motions of ARIN-Provider-Client.
IP addresses are assigned to your provider by ARIN/RIPE/APNIC and may be taken away from them at a moment's notice. They are also organized in network topologies, meaning that if the ruling stands, the entire routing of the Internet has to be re-thought.
Well ok, just migrating everyone to IPv6, and using v6-to-v4 tunnels might do the trick, Provided the judge doesn't make the claim you own your v4 address too, which with dynamic addresses, would get messy even faster.
Also, for that matter, what about static dhcp addresses, addresses that are assigned by a dynamic method, but keep up coming to the same value for a specific client, does the ruling say the client own them? If they do, I can imagine a whole bunch of dsl providers going "no we don't offer static ips anymore".
And that's because the ISP, which is responsible for routing, and for making sure the routing is coherent, and router-friendly, and that their own AS is reachable, is no longer involved in the assignment of those ips.
The only people who actually use ip addresses, and who have trouble with numbers, are people who operate nameservers, since their job is to offer address to name translation, so having their address be static is a requirement of the job, so they can be found. Now some of those are assigned in
Ruling that they own that ip address, considering the contracts between Arin and suppliers, means all those contracts have been invalidated. If I was ARIN, I'd be very very afraid right now. If you can own a block, what will you do if ARIN takes a block back for lack of use? Sue them of course, it's what the court just indicated by rendering your lease of those ips unenforceable, by virtue of saying you could own your ip numbers.
Now, I'm not sure why, but the article makes no mention that the the court issued a temporary restraining order, until migration is complete.
That means NAC has to offer ip forwarding for a limited time, to help migration, especially since the client applied to own ips at ARIN directly already.
The restraining order also looks(But IANAL) written in such as way as to prevent guerilla action on the part of NAC against the client, more than anything.
I do find it interesting that (I've done a lot of moves for my clients in similar situations, although perhaps smaller than this particular client) the client preferred to go to court, instead of putting pressure on NAC to renew at current prices, while preparing it's migration. 45 days is certainly not a lot of time for a truly large network, but just how many days did they win by going to court, including the TRO and the remand to higher court?
Although, maybe they just wanted some insurance, considering the penalties that NAC would incur if the client was down without "due cause". The amount in dollars for an 8-hour or more outage would certainly help with migra
Before the flaming starts, I am not saying that TRO's for abuse should not be issued, just that the procedures which allow the truly abused quick relief also allow the unscrupulous to use them to harrass others.
If someone wants to kick your arse, I dont think a piece of paper from some old white guy is going to stop them... $0.02
Chas
Linux User #296508 Get Counted!
Have an actual photo of it...
Well, if you read the court documents, you'll see that the guy suing the ISP is in a bad position; he's selling webhosting to people who sell webhosting to others on servers coloed at the ISP. He's a useless middleman in the deal & has refused attempts at being bought out by the ISP already.
The basis of his case is that he is completely dependant upon the ISP to do his business & they're rasing his rates to a point where he can't keep his business going, possibly in order to force him to sell. I'm not going to say that the ISP is being nice, but they're not entirely out of line.
Even with the network being temporarily re-routed, this guy is fucked; he has a single supplier for what he's selling & his supplier wants to start selling directly to his customers. If he was smart, he'd have set up his own datacenter by now.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
As a few people have noted: this is only a TEMPORARY restrainging order. After looking at PDF's of the clients claims they are basically saying that they used colocation service from this company. The business grew and has 15-20 people on staff. As the business grew, the defendent expressed interest in purchasing the company and hiring the owner. The owner didn't want this. The defendent went on to strong arm the client, charge fees above and beyond what their contract stipulated. They changed the agreement multiple times in an effort to cause trouble for the business owner. The owner has built a data facility to host his 1500 (if I recall correctly) servers himself. He has tried to work out a deal where he leases a minimum amount of service from the colocation facility and retains all the IP addresses while all of his servers are moved. Due to the possibility of losing business if there is extended down time, he has tried REPEATEDLY to structure an equitable deal. He isn't trying to take the IP addresses. He is trying to make sure the IP addresses aren't taken away so that services can be redirected to the new facility. He is and has been willing to pay for all services, moving fees, bandwidth, electrical usage, storage space, and so on THE ENTIRE TIME. Let me be clear about this: the client isn't trying to steal IP addresses. He has his own million+ dollar facility with addresses given to him by ARIN. He is simply trying to ensure a smooth transition which will not cause a loss of business -- something which he claims that the defendent has done the entire time. People need to stop freaking out. Mucho thanks to the person who posted the actual affadavits so we can see what is being blown out of proportion.
NAC is brutally trying to shut this guy down, at least according to his side of the story, so they can take over his business. He's trying to move to his own facility, but they are being complete dicks about facilitating the move, so a lawsuit was his only recourse. This is being discussed as if the internet routing structure was being attacked, or that he's trying to steal their old IP range. This is not the case. Read the court filings people.
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
NAC's *former* client apparently obtained portable IP space from ARIN over *FIFTEEN* months ago, and is leaving NAC *voluntarily*. Yet, now they want to force NAC to give up some of NAC's assigned IP space, which NAC obtained from ARIN in order to provide services to NAC clients. 45 days may not be a lot of time for a 'truly large network' but how about over FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY days?
Their former client is an utter asshole. They simply don't want to be responsible and make the effort to renumber their network, and want to use the lack of clue possessed by the legal system to their advantage, to cover up their own incompetence, and to steal from NAC. Their goal is not a "temporary" restraining order but rather a permanent judgement re-allocating the IP space. They are trying to assert property rights in it.
NAC pays for that IP space. NAC has to handle complaints about it. NAC has to manage routing issues. NAC has only a limited amout of IP space with which to service their customers. And most importantly, NAC DOES NOT OWN that space. ARIN merely assigned it to them, under an agreement which forbids NAC to do what the court has ordered.
Were I NAC, I would simply do as the court orders because doing otherwise is dangerous. And I would bill the former client for every last second spent on this, as well as a fee for handling any and all potential administration of the netblock (spam and other complaints, administrative email/contacts, so on), and of course a proportional share of the yearly ARIN fees. While fighting this.
What asswipes.
Larry
When 5+4 ZIP code extensions came out way back when, somebody in the national media suggested ditching the entire ZIP system and using the other 9-digit number you already had - your Social Security number - as your mailing address.
Fortunately for the 3 tons of bulk mail everybody receives each year, nobody took him seriously.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
We are now seeing the death throws of IPv4. IPv4 is beyond use by date, just that we have not woken up yet. IPv6 will hit in a big bang for the following reasons: 1. Asian address demand, particularly China (population) who are REALLY pissed that they don't have a Class A address 2. G3 Mobile devices Once the need for REAL IP addresses (not NATed) for home use and G3 devices then *everyone* will be screaming for IPv6.
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!