Ad Hoc, eDNS, AlterNIC and the bunch

Thu Apr 10 22:57:10 UTC 1997

On Thu, 10 Apr 1997, Deepak Jain wrote:

> I can see why the NSI doesn't want to share.
> 
> I can also why they must be made to share.
> 
> Isn't April 1997 the end of their contract anyway?

The official end is April 1998. However, the NSF had arranged to end the
contract early on March 31st of this year until the politicians stepped
in and the NSF Office of the Inspector General released a report
suggesting that the NSF should run the Internic in order to make money for
the government. But it was the Whitehouse, in the form of Ira Magaziner's
committee that actually put a stop to the ending of that contract.

Some collateral damage that occurred was that the contract deal included
rolling out the IP allocation functions to ARIN with seed money from NSI
but that also got stopped. And now there are people in the Pentagon and
the National Security Agency that believe ARIN is an important national
security issue and needs to be stopped. It appears that since IP
technology played an important role in the Gulf War they want to ensure
that the U.S. military has all the IP addresses they need in future.
Somebody should tell them it's not smart to run a military command and
control system over the public data networks. If they would only build
their own private satellite network, maybe call it MILNET, then they could
use their own set of private IP addresses without worrying about what the
public is doing.

It will be very interesting to see what happens at the April 14th-15th
meeting of the NSF's Federal Networking Council Advisory Council meeting
in Washington where both domain names and ARIN are on the agenda.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com