Regional Registries

Regional Registries / Recently Commented

ICANN Reloaded - Will They Ever Learn?

Less than a week ago, I posted a short blog piece entitled "Can ICANN Please Stop Shooting Itself in the Foot?" in which I questioned ICANN's actions in connection with the recently announced key signing ceremony. At the end of this piece I asked the question: "While it seems that ICANN continues it propensity to shoot itself in the foot, does the community need to start worrying about when ICANN takes aim at other more vital organizational body parts?" Well it looks like I only had to wait five days to get the answer to that question. more

What Digital Divide on IP Addresses?

I took an instant dislike to The Digital Divide on IP Addresses post for some reason, well for many reasons actually. First and foremost is that the implication that the "digital divide" is somehow caused by IP address allocation policies. While it is certainly true that there are "digital divides" between developed and developing parts of the world, the historical imbalance in IP addressing is not one of them. The fact is that while we will "run out" of IPv4 addresses at some point in the not too distant future, there are an unimaginably large number of IPv6 addresses available. more

The Digital Divide on IP Addresses

This growth is clearly unsustainable within the IPv4 address space. Not every country can have these utilization levels. The hunger for new addresses is greatest in China (currently at 1 IPv4 address per 4 inhabitants) and India (1 address per 53 inhabitants). To put these at the modest level of 1 address per inhabitant requires more than 2.2 billion addresses, where there are currently only 290 million left... Given these numbers and the overall strong growth, any hopes of being able to reuse space that is allocated but not used (i.e. pre-CIDR) are futile. This demand dwarfs the entire US allocation. more

Country Internet Registries: One African Perspective

Paul Wilson, Secretary-General of APNIC, was correct when he reminded the panelists of the IGF2009 workshop "Adopting IPv6: What You Need To Know" that "countries don't typically get IP address allocations, network service providers do". The ITU stills seems to cling to the notion that countries get IP blocks... more

The ITU and IPv6 Transition: Controversy at the IGF

At today's "Managing Critical Internet Resources" session of the Internet Governance Forum 2009, the ITU agenda on taking a role in IPv6 distribution once again reared its ugly head. In a heated exchange, Professor Dr Sureswaran Ramadass, the Director of Nav6 an ITU consultant/fanboy squared off with the new ICANN CEO about competition in IPv6 address distribution. more

IPv6 Answers to Common Questions from Policy Makers, Executives and Other Non-Technical Readers

A factual paper prepared in October 2009 for and endorsed by the Chief Executive Officers of ICANN and all the Regional Internet Registries that provides answers to commonly asked questions about IPv6 such as: How are allocations made, and to whom? How are IPv6 addresses actually being allocated? And why did such large IPv4 address allocations go to US organizations, including the US Government, and its Department of Defense? more

Are the FCC Workshops Fair?

The FCC has run three days of workshops on the National Broadband Plan now, for the purpose of bringing a diverse set of perspectives on broadband technology and deployment issues to the attention of FCC staff. You can see the workshop agendas here. The collection of speakers is indeed very diverse. As you would expect, the session on eGov featured a number of government people and a larger collection of folks from the non-profit sector, all but one of whom has a distinctly left-of-center orientation. Grass-roots devolution arguments have a leftish and populist flavor, so who better to make the argument than people from left-of-center think tanks? more

How is ICANN Spending Your Money?

ICANN has released their IRS Form 990 statements for the year ending June 30, 2008... ICANN says they use for-profit companies as comparables when determining employee compensation. However, even in the middle of a great recession, salaries have been going up, up, and up! more

FUD for Thought: ARIN Releases Comic Books

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has launched a comic book series to further help raise awareness for the adoption of IPv6 and other matters dealt by the organization. The comic books, called "Team ARIN", are fictionalized views of the organization, its processes, and the whole concept of Internet governance. "Though our heroes are fictional, the issues they face are very real," says ARIN. more

WIPO Cybersquatting Report Ignores Real UDRP Trends

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) asserted on Monday that new gTLDs from ICANN would unleash a global crime wave. This dire warning was bolstered by an astonishing statistic: a whopping eight per cent (8%) increase in UDRP complaints from 2007 to 2008! But WIPO's press release tells only a very little of the truth. Astonishingly, the UDRP system actually works pretty well... more

No Fines for Comcast

Note: this is an update on my earlier story, which incorrectly said that the AP reported that Chairman Martin was seeking to impose "fines" on Comcast. In fact, the story used the word "punish" rather than "fine," and a headline writer at the New York Times added "penalty" to it "F.C.C. Chairman Favors Penalty on Comcast" (I won't quote the story because I'm a blogger and the AP is the AP, so click through.) Much of the initial reaction to the story was obviously colored by the headline. more

Is It Time to Create a Market for IPv4 Addresses?

It's fascinating to watch the Internet technical community grapple with policy economics as they face the problems creating by the growing scarcity of IPv4 addresses. The Internet Governance Project (IGP) is analyzing the innovative policies that ARIN, RIPE and APNIC are considering as a response to the depletion of IPv4 addresses. more

IPv6 and Airline Tickets… Tales of Two Transitions

The internet bus continues to accelerate straight into the IPv4 address depletion wall with spirited discussions continuing on how to divvy up the remnants of the address space. Obviously all five Regional Internet Registries (RIR's) want to make sure they get their fair share from IANA but what is a fair share remains the subject of interpretation. In the mean time, scenarios of a speculative land rush and auctions of ever smaller address blocks abound with unattractive consequences such as an explosion of the size of the routing table and a stunted growth of the global internet economy... In the meantime, the airline industry completed a rather significant migration of their own... more

Domain Name Price Jump: Moore’s Law or Parkinson’s Laws?

As expected, VeriSign raised the price of domain names, effective in October. New prices wholesale prices (to the registrar) for .com domain names are going from $6.42 to $6.86, while .net will increase from $3.85 to $4.23. This news came a few days ago in a letter to registrars. (Hint to consumers: renew your domains now.) ...So, basically, many if not most of VeriSign's registry costs have been falling at an exponential rate. Hard disk storage, computing performance, bandwidth, RAM storage... yet the cost is going up. How is this justified? more

IPv6 in Slovak Academic Network

The main reason for developing a new internet protocol was based on lack of address; however this was not the only reason. Unfortunately, many people think of IPv6 only as enormous address space, but there are a lot of other advantages, for example... authorizations and authentication function are implemented directly in the protocol and are mandatory... automatic configuration of network interfaces based on their physical address... protocol itself recognizes data streams which must be transmitted in real time, and the data must be processed with highest priority... more