IAHC Plan rejectd by US Gov't

Fri May 30 17:32:02 UTC 1997

IANA is a useful registry for numbers of all sorts (result codes for
things like SMTP or NNTP, SNMP variables, you name it), and does a good
job of keeping track of which numbers have been assigned to what.

The vast majority of these numbers are assigned during the
IETF standards process, as protocols are developed.

Two sets of things that IANA has had historical responsibility for
include the allocation of IP addresses and the delegation and maintenaince
of certain DNS zones.   Both of these have recently been politicized.

Unfortunately the recently heavily politicized functions will still
take some work to be separated from the ordinary functions, but I gather
that is the ultimate objective.

I also gather that IANA has been offered some two and a half years
of funding both by APNIC and RIPE, which, if nothing else, should
help protect the non-Americans from the total lunacy brewing in the USA,
so that networks in the APNIC and RIPE regions can get on with building
their parts of the Internet, and developing Internet protocols and tools.

I can't resist a quip to tie this into NANOG.  I have an outage report.
America is broken.  Route around it.

	Sean.