[YA] Fwd: Class B Purchase

Mon Oct 5 21:59:36 UTC 1998

Karl,

>> They have all of the legal weight of a Jim Flem-o-gram.
>Then so does ARIN's and the IANA's ability to control and delegate addresses.

No.  ARIN (et al) and the IANA have the ability to control/delegate
addresses because by and large, the people who use the Internet, in
particular, Internet service providers, mutually agree they have that
ability.  In other words, the registries are an (arguably) neutral forum
which allow end users and service providers to agree who "owns" what
address space instead of establishing who has the ability to use addresses
in an n^2 multi-lateral fashion.  As the Internet service provider
community has found it easier to use the registries to impose certain
policies/restrictions than to implement those restrictions themselves
unilaterally, the registries have become the body that implements
allocation policies.  If you do not like these policies, your argument is
with the Internet service provider community, which strangely enough, now
is explicitly in a position to modify those policies.

Regards,
-drc