History of 24/8 (was RE: for folks tracking DDOS sources or reading the GRC attack log)

Tue Jun 26 05:01:53 UTC 2001

[Long, boring, and not much operational content.  You are warned]

A bit of biased history:

Long ago, in an Internet very different than today's, Jon Postel was 
convinced by people with more than a little knowledge about such things 
that this "IP over Cable TV infrastructure" idea might actually take 
off.  In fact, he was convinced that it was going to work so well that all 
the Cable TV providers all over the world were going to besiege the IANA 
like a biblical swarm of locusts and Jon would spend all his time fending 
off requests for huge blocks of addresses.

My understanding of why things went to the IANA was that @Home was rejected 
for a large block of address space and they appealed to the IANA (as was 
the policy in those days).  After much discussion, multiple requests for 
more information, proof, first-borns, etc., Jon agreed that the IP over 
CATV infrastructure model of operation was sufficiently different that it 
justified special treatment (the argument being, to my understanding, that 
IP over CATV provided something new at the time: always on end user service).

The convincer (I'm told) suggested that the Cable TV industry was going to 
form a trade association that would handle industry coordination 
requirements like, oh say, allocation of IP addresses.  Jon decided to 
allocate 24/8 to this (at that time not-yet-existant organization) with the 
understanding that all IP over CATV infrastructure address requirements 
were to be managed by this new trade association once it was formed.  Until 
it was formed, the IANA would authorize ARIN (InterNIC at the time, I 
believe) to allocate address space out of the 24/8 block.  Of course, 
history has shown that no such organization was formed (if you assume AT&T 
is not that organization).

Anyhow, when APNIC, InterNIC, and RIPE-NCC found out about all this, we all 
expressed significant unhappiness as we didn't think there was any 
significant difference between a IP over CATV provider and any other 
ISP.  However, what was done was done and it would've been a bit difficult 
to get @Home to return the block since they'd already allocated a bunch of 
customers to it.  APNIC gave IP over CATV ISPs the option of allocating out 
of normal APNIC space or forwarding their request to the IANA.  I think one 
request was forwarded to the IANA for an IP over CATV provider (but my 
memory is hazy).  Not sure if RIPE-NCC forwarded any requests.  After a 
while, I saw 24/8 as just another InterNIC/ARIN block, albeit one with a 
weird genealogy.

At the time, 24/8 was pretty controversial.  Many of the loons whinged and 
moaned about the unfairness of it all, making all sorts of bogus claims 
like @Home got the entirety of 24/8, that Jon was biased about the 
allocation since he worked with many of the @Home principals, etc.  But 
then again, the loons whinge and moan about pretty much 
anything.  Controversy flared up over this more recently when ICANN used 
24/8 as an example of RIR-independent address space that would justify 
ICANN doing allocations of address space themselves.  Suffice it to say 
that this was a poor example.

Now, isn't that more than you ever wanted to know?

Rgds,
-drc
(who played a small role at APNIC in a previous life)

At 02:24 PM 6/26/2001 +1000, Bruce Campbell wrote:
>On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Richard A. Steenbergen wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 04:54:12PM -0700, Mike Batchelor wrote:
> > >
> > > >     24.0/8 is the "cable block".
> > >
> > > No it's not.  Check out 24.132/14 for instance.
>
>and 24.192/14
>
> > IANA and ARIN seem to think it is... Check out:
> > http://www.iana.org/assignments/network-24
>
>24/8 has been used by all 3 RIRs to make assignments to cable modems in
>times past.
>
>Recent events have lead to the non-ARIN parts of 24/8 being taken up by
>ARIN, in addition to the non-allocated-to-a-RIR parts of 24/8.  Updates to
>various databases will simply take a bit of time, thats all.
>
>--==--
>Bruce.