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

John R. Levine johnl at iecc.com
Mon Jan 31 00:25:31 UTC 2011


> 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



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