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."
Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
i find it funny when im banned... but can still use my mod points...
sucks that so many people come through the same gateway. someone in this office must belong to the GNAA..... i have my suspicions....
I am moving, please let me take my GPS co-od! (Score:5, Funny)
I am moving, please tell the govt to let me take my GPS co-ordinates with me!
doh...
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
they should get a clue (Score:4, Insightful)
"But I want to live on 115 Baker Street". How can a judge get that dumb.
Re:they should get a clue (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:they should get a clue (Score:5, Insightful)
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:they should get a clue (Score:4, Informative)
I'd expect a caching server to disregard a short TTL as it would defy the purpose.
Re:they should get a clue (Score:3, Informative)
Re:they should get a clue (Score:4, Informative)
Re:they should get a clue (Score:5, Funny)
You insenstive clod! Most of my friends don't have DNS, they can only use IP addresses. If my IP changes, they'll be unable to get their email!
Next you'll be telling me that bang path email addresses aren't cool, either!
Re:they should get a clue (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:they should get a clue (Score:4, Informative)
Everything these days is done with DNS. anyone sutpid enough to go to a site via IP address is brainless and should get a nice web page telling them connection refused. Heck, I even have auto updating DDNS to my home cable modem line, I don't even type in an IP address to hit my home machine. In addition to that, would you buy something from a company that says Cheap cd's.. come to our website at https://10.11.12.13/sendusyourcreditcardinfo.html ? Nope, you wouldn't.
These ISP's are contractually assigned these addresses by ARIN, they do not have any ownership of the addresses. Depending on the size of the block of addresses, and their colo setup they could have to disrupt the address range much longer than a simple changing of IP addresses and a TTL expiration on a DNS server.
There are a ton of technical reasons this is a very bad idea(tm) if it gets as bad as people taking individual addresses with them you will never be able to get anywhere becuase BGP tables will become so huge current routers won't hold them.
Re:they should get a clue (Score:5, Insightful)
IP and phone numbers (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:IP and phone numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
(Try taking your phone number accross a country boundary for instance).
Jeroen
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.
Re:IP and phone numbers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:IP and phone numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
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:IP and phone numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:IP and phone numbers (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, IP addresses are like what phone numbers used to be. Back in Ye Olden Days, you phone number essentially described the physical location of the wire pair that delivered your dialtone. A phone number of 471-1234 meant your pair was out of Central Office 47, sub area 1, pair 1234. You could change your last 4 digits, but not your 3 digit prefix, as the prefix designated the physical building where the 10,000 pairs serving your area lived. This is still the case for landlines in many areas (my boss had his shop in 471, but moved a half mile south and Verizon made him change to 477). Portability is possible with wireless phones because (by definition) they aren't tied to any particular physical location. Since a certain degree of soft routing already has to happen to get the call to the cell nearest you, it's not much of a leap to allow routing to other providers.
IP addresses aren't like that, though. They were never designed to be soft routed. That's what DNS is for. They IP address, in the end, is a number pinpointing the exact location of a physical circuit. There is no system below the IP address level to perform the necessary redirection. You can forward traffic from the old IP address to the new, but you can't take the old IP address with you.
Re:they should get a clue (Score:4, 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
Not an accurate metaphor (Score:3, Insightful)
not as obvious or clear-cut as a physical address or even a post code.
Presumably as the case proceeds good technical a
Re:they should get a clue (Score:4, Informative)
Re:they should get a clue (Score:5, Informative)
The reason is that the internet core routers already have over 100.000 entries in the IPv4 routing table. When routing millions of packets a second, the router needs to do millions of route lookups a second.
This still works (barely) because the number of entries in the routing table (think of them as zip codes) can be looked up easily. If the postal service had portable, personal zip codes, the zip code system would also be completely useless...
Beyond a certain point, there is simply no physical way that you could fit all the routing table entries in a cache that can be accessed fast enough to look up the routing table entries as fast as the packets come in.
I'm sure the state of New Jersey will legislate a higher speed of light to get around this problem, but that's not going to fix it for the rest of us...
Re:they should get a clue (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Please read RFC 2772 [faqs.org]. Having portable IP addresses the way you describe is explicitly forbidden with IPv6, for good technical reasons!
Re:they should get a clue (Score:3, Insightful)
And, even past that, the addresses were assigned to the ISP, and leased to the customer. This is the equivalent of you renting a car from Hertz for your business, then declaring it actually belongs to you.
Both the customer and the judge in this case are morons.
Ouch... Keep your IP? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ouch... Keep your IP? (Score:5, Funny)
When rules are for the others, is there any rule left?
Re:Ouch... Keep your IP? (Score:4, Informative)
ifconfig eth0 -hw ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
The risks... (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of "average" people voting regarding nuclear power...
Re:The risks... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The risks... (Score:3, Funny)
Wait a sec. You're sure pi's does not equal to three?
No wonder I can't get this stupid wheel to work!
Damn Indiana legislature technical specifications!
Re:The risks... (Score:5, Funny)
(of course, out-of-staters with their fancy 6.28 radian tires will experience substantial bumps when travelling our roads)
And to reply to my own post... (Score:5, Informative)
...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.
Average people (Score:3, Insightful)
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 i
What benifit to the person that brought the suit? (Score:5, Interesting)
It has to do with renumbering their network. (Score:4, Informative)
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 [merit.edu].
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
Re:It has to do with renumbering their network. (Score:5, Informative)
After reading the thread on NANOG you should have read the scanned case papers [e-gerbil.net]. 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:What benifit to the person that brought the sui (Score:4, Informative)
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.
It's possible to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
Portable numbers (Score:4, Funny)
About Zip Codes (Score:3, Informative)
OK. (Score:5, Informative)
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:OK. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:OK. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:OK. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:OK. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
~S
Full article text (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Technology Savvy Judges Needed... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
Re:Technology Savvy Judges Needed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does everyone keep saying this, and why does it keep getting modded up? I know it seems like this was the case, since everyone but us is stupid. However, the judge issued a temporary order. The thought process was probably more like "Hey, I have no idea what I'm dealing with here, so I'll make the parties abide by the previous agreement and do some work." If the final judgement comes back and says in there somewhere "If we can do it with cell phones, why not IPs," then maybe I'll agree with what you're saying. Until then, it's just silly elitism and downright wrong. We're talking about someone who has been through law school and is now a judge. Let's have a little more respect.
Re:Technology Savvy Judges Needed... (Score:3, Informative)
This is why judges get to grant temporary orders. So both sides can get expert witnesses and other type
DNS Solves This (Score:5, Insightful)
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
ugh (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
ISP solution -- private IP's (Score:3, Interesting)
Not like phone numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not like phone numbers (Score:5, Informative)
IP is not a phone number. It's an address. Such as "123 Baker St, State, Country". IPv4 can be thought of as being of the form Country.State.Street.Number (except with numbers from 1-255 for each field).
IRL, Hostname is like a name in a guide to the city, like "Joe's pizzaria", that you want to get to. On the net, it's a website like "www.yahoo.com" that you want to get to.
IRL, a DNS server would be an addressbook. It tells you Joe's pizzaria is at 123 Baker St. If Joe's pizzaria moves, the addressbook can be updated, and can tell subsequent users that Joe's pizzaria is at 456 Main St. Likewise, it will tell you that "www.yahoo.com" is at 15.234.43.23
With the above descriptions, even the n00bs can feel smart, and think they understand the whole interweb thing..
This is what DNS is for (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what DNS is for, so you can plunk any IP in and have it resolve properly.
Re:This is what DNS is for (Score:3, Informative)
You know, there are things that won't accept a DNS name and require an IP address. Some VPN clients are this way.
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
ipv6 doesn't help (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Can the law gurus clarify? (Score:3, Insightful)
> 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?
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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
It's not like cell phone numbers at all. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
More on this... (Score:5, Funny)
Lawyers should not do technical stuff. (Score:3, Insightful)
Details of the case: (Score:5, Informative)
The company in question is Pegasus Web Technology [pwebtech.com] run by a Mr. Jason Silvergate.
-davidu
Re:Details of the case: (Score:5, Informative)
What Pegasus/UCI/Jason somebody wants from the court order is a temporary window where NAC will not poison the routes to his old IP addresses for the next two months while he completes his migration. This is NOT a permanent breaking of the ARIN hierarchy, and is allowed, but not required, by ARIN rules for customer migration on a temporary basis.
Damn, and I had a good rant brewing until I RTFAffadavit. But this is
the AC
what's scary about IP allocation (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Good thing it's one sided and simple - or is it? (Score:3, Informative)
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
What's the hubbub, bub? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
We aren't helping things.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
ARIN are taking up the case (Score:5, Informative)
This is good news.
Court Says Customers May Take Postal Adrs Too! (Score:4, Funny)
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!
Hysterical slashclone action here (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:No different then cell phone number portability (Score:3, Informative)
It is not impossible, few things are, but it would require a significant investment in time, money, and new software for every backbone provider.
Re:No different then cell phone number portability (Score:4, Insightful)
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!"
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:Ineresting... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Are they STUPID?!?! (Score:4, Informative)
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.Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:3, Informative)
Definition: Ignorant [reference.com]
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.
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:4, Funny)
-Lucas
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It just goes to show you... (Score:4, Informative)
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
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
To use your analogy (Score:3, Informative)
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