[governance] Good contribution on IP addresses and Internet Governance

[Karl Auerbach]

On 04/22/2011 01:23 PM, Carlos A. Afonso wrote:
> Which one? George's, Canada's, or McTim's? You might find Industry
> Canada's declaration innocuous, but... ignorant??

A lot of people treat the word "property" as some sort of mystical 
talisman full of deep meaning and overwhelming portent.

But to do so is silly.

"Property" is nothing more than the accumulation of human-defined rights 
and obligations that people (and fake-people, i.e. corporations) have 
towards a tangible or intellectual thing.

Only the laws of physics - things like gravity and inertia -supersede 
what we humans decide are those rights and obligations.  In other words 
there is no "natural" or god given law of property.

Yet so many people think that if they label a thing as "property" that 
an "owner's" rights are paramount over every other interest.

That, of course, is nonsense best left where it belongs - in the middle 
ages.

Leaping to IP addresses - they are just numbers - and the only reason 
they are useful is that there is a binding between a computer interface 
and one of those numbers that is honored by one or more people/companies 
that route IP packets.  It is that honoring of the use of one of those 
numbers by a particular person that is what makes an "IP address" into 
something more useful than a random number.

Most folks who do the routing of IP packets honor the allocations made 
by Jon Postel and by the RIRs.  It is that honoring of allocations that 
give IP addresses their value.

What is being bought and sold when people "sell" IP addresses is more 
than the number itself - it is the "good will", that honoring of the 
number for the purposes of routing IP packets, that is being sold.

Yet even that is a weak right - because just because you or I have an IP 
address that comes from Jon Postel or a RIR does not mean that those who 
do IP routing are obligated to honor me by routing packets towards that 
address number.

In other words, even if I have a RIR/Postel granted IP address I have no 
right to require that other people configure their routers so that 
packets bearing my address are, in fact, routed towards me and not to 
someone else.

What I am getting at with all of this is that when we start to talk 
about IP addresses, let's drop the heavily overloaded word "property" 
and start to talk about who obtains what legally enforceable rights *and 
duties* as the result of an address allocation.

(And, of course, this includes the question of who can do such 
allocations.  I am busy writing a note on why I feel that IPv6 will not 
take off - because we have already begun to take steps towards what I 
call a "lumpy" internet, in which the end-to-end principle has been lost 
in favor of a view of the net as a platform for a few popular 
applications.  This lumpy net is formed from several *complete* IP 
address spaces that join to one another through well defined (and thus 
easily controlled, regulated, and taxed) application layer gateways.)

	--karl--




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