CircleID

Such errors happen on a daily basis. You notice them in articles that pertain to subject matter about which you know something more than the average reader.

Imagine all of the stories that you read with subjects about which you know little more than the average reader. Imagine all of the errors that you take at face value.

Think about the last time a news report was made about someone you know, who later told you, "well, that's not really how it was..."

Every day. Every damned day.

I emailed the BBC, and pointed them to this article. It seems they have changed at least a few of their statements.

Thanks for a good article.

About uneven distribution of IP addresses between the US and Asia: I think it's strange to totally rule out injustices.

I'm sure that IANA is fair, but I think it's also fair to say that some parts of the World got a head start: There is an important difference between requesting a block of IP addresses in 1993 and doing it in 2003: I'm sure that the assignment policies have become much stricter during the last decade.

So people in countries where the Internet is just starting to have an impact will have a much harder time obtaining IP-addresses than people in countries which started a decade ago.

Address blocks are sized by "prefix", the smaller the prefix the bigger the block.  The biggest conventional unit of allocation is a /8 - there simply are not enough of these to hand out one to every country - yet many companies have several.  Many of these allocations predate the RIRs and the ability to transfer those prior allocations has yet to be established.

Some of the smaller blocks (/24) are more valuable than others because they are grandfathered into the global distribution of routing information.

The RIRs have established allocate address blocks.  Are those rules based on a full consideration of all the competing interests? For example there are many smaller ISPs who complain that they can not obtain addresses to expand their businesses.

Many in the internet community consider NATs to be a violation of the end-to-end principle.  NATs can, for instance, make Voice-over-IP difficult.

From the point of view of those who route packets the issue is the number of prefixes (destination blocks).  The CIDR reports keep creeping up.  When I was at Cisco we were concerned that things would get "interesting" when the number of prefixes exceeded 200,000.  Today we are over 123,000.  It is difficult to extrapulate the growth curve - but we need to be concerned that the size of routing tables, as well as the time to propagate them and the time to stabilize/reconverge after a route failure, is increasing.  IPv6 will do little to solve these problems.  in fact because there are simply more address bytes to move around, IPv6 could exacerbate the problem.

With always-on connections, the distinction between static and dynamic is reduced - an address is consumed whether it is assigned dynamically or statically assigned.

When we look to the future of the internet as a utility we can easily conceive of fire and security alarm systems and voice-over-IP that will need IP addresses on a 24x7x365 basis.

I believe the article places too much faith in the RIR's ability to consider all of the competing needs and issues, some of which involve significant decisions regarding economic policies.

ICANN was to have been the forum in which these concerns were to have been addressed.  Yet, ICANN has abandoned that role to the RIRs.  The RIRs have done a very good job so far.  But I am concerned that their focus and constituencies are too narrow and that the RIRs do not adequately hear some of the larger, softer issues.

Reminds me of the coverage of 911/Iraq/War/Terrorist etc.

Don't know about Bad Journalism, but I know a bit about Dumb Journalism. Have a look at http://members.iinet.net.au/~lk319386/index.html
It's a site I whacked up in a hurry. I notified the radio station of the error and it vanished in a couple of hours, but no reply from them. Strange looking Australian Police, I think.
Regards, Les Kirschner.
Paper_tigerau@yahoo.com