[NA-Discuss] Fwd: The Internet Society on Egypt’s Internet shutdown

[Avri Doria]

Hi,

I did not say it was a technical problem.  Of course I understand that routing include establishing and withdrawing routes all the time, I figure most people know this, it is after al what routing protocols do.  But thank you for the tutelage.

It is a policy problem related to ICANN areas of responsibility.



a.

On 30 Jan 2011, at 19:25, John R. Levine wrote:

>> However, while routing is not specifically in ICANN's scope, making portions of the Internet address space unreachable by withdrawing routes, might just be within its scope, i.e IP addresses and AS numbers. This would certainly seem to be related to core value:
> 
> Networks withdraw routes and make address space unreachable all the time, many times a day.  Usually it's for innocuous technical reasons.  ICANN hands out the ASNs and IP space, but has nothing to do with the maintenance of the route table, other than the single entry for ICANN itself.
> 
> I'm with Evan, here.  This is not a technical problem.  For all we know, the Egyptian government disconnected the networks with an axe, and the routes are just going away as a side effect.
> 
> Something that is a technical problem is that crooks have hijacked some of the now idle IP address space and are announcing it, pretending to be Egyptian networks.  There is technology to sign route announcements, which would deter that, but it's not widely deployed.
> 
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
>