[AfriNIC-rpd] RE:AFPUB-2011-v4-003-draft-02 - Limited Out of RegionAllocation of IPv4 Resources - of Legacy Space

[David Conrad]

Owen,

>> Wasa it? Aren't the RIRs "agents" or "designees" of IANA who gavve the allocated originally?  
> Most of the legacy space in Africa was probably originally delegated by InterNIC, either
> the SRI InterNIC, or, the Network Solutions InterNIC, both of which were administered
> under a contract to the NSF related to, but, not directly subordinate to the IANA contract
> which was held by Jon Postel of University of Southern California Information Sciences
> Institute and later ICANN.

Just for the sake of historical accuracy, "InterNIC" (a service mark of the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, now licensed exclusively to ICANN) was an NSF project initiated in 1993 which consisted of 3 parts, the Directory Services portion (awarded to AT&T), the Information services portion (awarded to General Atomics) and the Registration Services portion (awarded to Network Solutions).  The InterNIC cooperative agreement ended in 1998.  There was no "SRI InterNIC" -- the term "InterNIC" didn't exist prior to 1992 when NSF initiated the competitive bid for services.  My understanding of how things evolved was that "NIC" services (which included address allocation) were initially provided by Stanford Research Institute (aka Stanford Research International) initially under a (D)ARPA contract starting in 1967 (Doug Englebart was the primary investigator).  SRI-NIC performed these services until 1990.  DCA (now DISA) became the contract driver in 1984. In 1990, the "NIC" services contract was transitioned to Government Systems, Inc. and GSI sub-contracted to Network Solutions. In 1991, NIC services themselves were relocated from Menlo Park, CA to Chantilly, VA (this transition didn't go well and there was much unhappiness).  Since most of the growth in the network at the time was non US-DoD related, DoD threw non-DoD NIC services over to NSF, hence the creation of InterNIC.

Jon Postel's involvement was through the USC-ISI "Tera-node Network Technology" project funded by DARPA. I don't believe IANA was even mentioned in the TNT project until the last renewal when the Internet governance used food began to hit the fan, rather Jon's activities, including RFC Editor and IANA stuff, was part of the overhead associated with the TNT project.

> At the time, InterNIC was also responsible for registrations in the COM, ORG, NET, and
> EDU gTLDs. I believe the DDN NIC handled .MIL and I am not sure who handled .INT.
> I believe the remaining TLDs were the ccTLDs.

SRI-NIC handled all DNS registrations from when the DNS was invented until the GSI transition since SRI-NIC was also acting as the DDN-NIC (see http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1261.html).

Regards,
-drc