Question: What is your opinion on IP numbers attribution, particularly when IPv6 will develop. At present IP numbers are essentially delegated to ISP's. What about direct attribution?

Nominee Replies

Andy Mueller-Maguhn - posted on 2000-10-02 00:31:06 Routing requieres ISPīs to handle this issue in respect to avoid complexity of routing tables to handle moving IP#īs. The current mechanism led to some problems, cause ISPīs handled userīs need for IP#s very different, some of them even negotiating users needs and gave users only dynamic IP#s. ICANN should find a strict policy that Internet users do need a fixed set of IP#s in the future. While this is no problem for IPv6, we will still have to handle IPv4 for a long time and need to define a right for an IP# for users, to enable pariticating at the net, not only connecting to it. So direct attribution must mean technicaly to have a right on one or more IP#s, where the administrative handling of this attribution will realistically be the role of the ISP. Olivier Muron - posted on 2000-09-28 08:30:10 The policies concerning IPv4 adresses and in particular the attribution of fixed addresses have to be explained by a context of scarcity. In a context of scarcity. Concerning IPv6, there is no longer any scarcity and users should be able to get as many addresses as they need. Recent positions by RIPE indicate that any user (individuals as well as companies) planning to implement a subnetwork should get a /48 (that is more than 65,000 addresses). In order for the Internet to cope with the growth of user, aggregation of IP address is necessary at the world-wide level. If adresses were affected directly to users, this aggregation could never take place (a user could change ISP, or move to another continent and would require a specific announce to be reached...). This is why, adresses are given in large chunks to ISP who offer to the rest of the world an aggregated block. As a board member I will commit myself to a fair and easy access of individual users to this ressource. Jeanette Hofmann - posted on 2000-09-26 18:29:13 Before the introduction of CIDR (classless Inter-Domain Routing) in the early 90s, IPv4 addresses indeed belonged to those to whom they had been allocated. This had to be changed because of exploding routing tables. If IP addresses were allocated to single hosts they couldn't be aggregated into a hierarchy. If there was no hierarchy in the IP land, routers would need to know every single IP address in cyberspace in order to be able to compute paths between the knots sending and receiving data packages. Sooner or later, it would be faster to transmit your data on foot ;-)