(UPDATE) Can a Customer take their IP's with them? (Court says yes!)

Wed Jun 30 00:58:28 UTC 2004

On 30-jun-04, at 1:47, Alex Rubenstein wrote:

> What I AM looking for is a commentary from the internet community,
> strictly relating to the fact that a judge has issued a TRO that 
> forces an
> ISP (NAC) to allow a third-party, who WILL NOT be a Customer of NAC, 
> to be
> able to use IP Space allocated to NAC. In other words, I am asking 
> people
> to if they agree with my position, lawsuit or not, that non-portable 
> IP's
> should not be portable between parties, especially by a state superior
> court ordered TRO.

I think we all agree that without aggregation, there'd be no internet. 
We can also all agree that the state of aggregation isn't quite as good 
as it could be. So apparently there is some wiggle room between theory 
and practice.

But aren't we jumping the gun by reacting to a temporary restraining 
order? I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on tv, but the way I 
understand it is that those are issued in order to make certain that 
the verdict won't be moot because the damage is already done. So a TRO 
doesn't have any bearing on the merits of the case. And even if the 
court orders that the addresses must be portable, there may be reasons 
why this is appropriate in this specific case rather than that the 
court takes the position that all address space should be portable.