Court Says Customers May Take IPs Away From ISP 802
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."
The risks... (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of "average" people voting regarding nuclear power...
What benifit to the person that brought the suit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
~S
ISP solution -- private IP's (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The risks... (Score:4, Interesting)
Judge probably thinks it's like cell phones (Score:2, Interesting)
For those that missed it... (Score:1, Interesting)
Check it out here [npr.org].
In the long run (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Another example of judges being uninformed... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cool! (Score:1, Interesting)
Well my home connection is banned from Slashdot through no fault of mine (as is some other people I know across the city who are with the same ISP as me), forcing me to post comments from work. And the Slashdot banning system doesnt seem to have specific provisions from unbanning select users with good karma from a vast swath of IP blocks...
So since Slashdot seems to have banned my whole ISP, maybe soon I'll be able to find another IP address so I can post on Slashdot on evenings and weekends?
Re:they should get a clue (Score:1, Interesting)
1. How long before the lawsuit demanding that you keep your physical home address?
2. Am I just cynical, or will this lawsuit succeed?
2. When a famous physicist said "Remember, no matter where you go, there you are" I don't think this is what he had in mind.
You Cell phone users started this precedent (Score:2, Interesting)
Can I port my IP? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:they should get a clue (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OK. (Score:3, Interesting)
How can a judge get that dumb? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:No different then cell phone number portability (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [dummies.com].
Re:IP and phone numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
You obviously don't understand routing. In order to have IP address portability like you want, all of the core routers on the internet would have to have an entry for each and every discreet IP address on the internet... 4 Billion+ addresses, lets say 16 bytes each, that's 64 GIGAbytes of RAM, just for the routing table!
It's just not practical for small networks (class C or smaller) to be portable.
It sucks when you're a customer who doesn't have a portable address block, but it's not practical to hand them out to small companies. I wish my company could be dual homed, but it ain't gonna happen.
</FirstImpression>
May I recommend 192.168.*.* and 127.0.0.1
<Reconsider>
Oh... You DO get it...
Well said!
</Reconsider> --Mike--
Re:Virtual networks, virtual addresses (Score:4, Interesting)
That's oversimplified of course, but essentially, the precendent this sets is that routers will have to remember every IP address in existance and which direction traffic to it should go. Without being able to trust that larger blocks are largely unbroken, routing will get out of control, out of hand, out of the realm of the processing power or storage of current routing technology, etc....
-N
Re:they should get a clue (Score:5, Interesting)
Set your DNS TTL low and make the switch. Within 15 minutes all traffic should go to the new IPs. It's not like someone you knew ten years ago is going to try to contact you on that IP...
Pffftt.
Every time I've changed the A record which have always had a TTL of 2 hours, I've seen a small trickle of traffic hit the old IP addresses for, I shit you not, at least two-three weeks afterward.
Some providers completely ignore your TTL entries when they cache them.
We kept the old IP addresses active for about a month (and had them do HTTP redirects to the new location, by an alternate name).
Re:IP and phone numbers (Score:4, Interesting)
The internet ip system should be transparent, if anything is working on fixed ip's, then it needn't.
dns is a layer above. if you register your.ip.in.numbers.com and point it to the same ip, then you can fiddle anything behind it.
Why does he want his IP? wierd. It is more akin to wanting to keep the same phone number (here I am saying a phone number is like a dns) but also the same phone line and system addressing numbers (the numbers that the exchange sees you as.
So he should keep his dns, but forget how the ip is running. my opinion.
Class B addresses move about (Score:2, Interesting)
claimed 2 class B address ranges. They moved
them from ISP to ISP.
Re:And to reply to my own post... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
As a folklorist, I find this fucking hilarious. Somebody refutes one urban legend only to invoke another urban legend.
Get this straight, people: Indiana NEVER legislated the value of pi. In fact, the legislation on which the rumor is based actually isn't about pi, per se, but about "circle squaring". Here's a good explanation of what really happened:
http://www.simonsingh.net/Pi.html [simonsingh.net]
(One minor mistake on this page, the digits in pi are anything but random)
You can also check out "A History of Pi" (Beckmann) for a more detailed explanation and a picture of the actual bill.
Re:What benifit to the person that brought the sui (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:1, Interesting)
State department of public utilities ring a bell?
NeuStar people, Neustar (Score:1, Interesting)
Phone companies buy their blocks of telephone numbers from NeuStar. They have the government contract to manage the North American Numbering Plan. Just like Verisign, but in the telephone world.
I work in the telecom industry. This is just like Local Number Portability (LNP). The problem is that Slashdotters don't understand the first thing about LNP. I've posted probably a dozen comments explaining how it works, do a search at "Score:0" and you will find them if you really want to know.
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Don't you already? (Score:2, Interesting)
Fortunately for the 3 tons of bulk mail everybody receives each year, nobody took him seriously.
Bring on IPv6 (Score:2, Interesting)