ニュースレターNo.9/1997年7月発行
7. English Page
7.2 Overview of JPNIC
1. History and organization.
JPNIC was founded as a Union of Internet service providers in Japan on April 1993. On March 31, 1997, it was given permission by the government to register as a probono association. Until that time, although it had been operating as a “quasi-association”, it had actually been doing activities similar to a registered association. Since then, the officially acknowledged successor has taken over all the rights, responsibilities, and undertakings of its predecessor, including JP domain name registration and IP address assignment in Japan. In addition, it has added some new activities concerning education and census on the Japanese Internet.
JPNIC is made up of General Meeting, Board of Trustees, Steering Committee, and Secretariat. The General Meeting decides budgets, authorizes audit reports, elects the trustees, and makes other important decisions. Members of the Steering Committee are appointed by the Board. While the number of trustees was 7 when it existed as a quasi-association, the number of trustees has since reached 15. The secretariat currently consists of 11 staffs.
The budget for fiscal year, 1997, is about 6.5 million U.S. dollars; 34% of which is due to a membership fee, 19% to an assignment charge, and the remaining part being the balance carried over from the previous fiscal year. To avoid over-income, caused by tremendous growth in the Japanese Internet, we have recently reduced the membership fee and assignment charge as of Apr. 1.
2. JP domains
JP domain names are categorized into two groups: one being functional type domains, and the other, geographical domains. Currently we have 6 functional types, each of which is identified by 2-letter-coded second level domain names. For example, nic.ad.jp is registered to Japan Network Information Center, which is working on network administration, so that the domain name has "ad" as its second level domain name. The six second levels are AD, CO, AC, GO, OR and NE. Geographical domains have suitable codes indicating the location of the organizations or individuals as the second level.
JP domain registration policy is roughly summarized as follows:
2.1. first come, first served,
2.2. one domain name, for one organization,
2.3. non transferable,
2.4. local presence in Japan is required,
For the principles 2.2 and 2.3, analogous policy may not
be found in the InterNIC's .com domains. JPNIC thinks
these principles play important roles in reducing
possible conflicts of domain names, and prevent trading
of domain names, of which JPNIC thinks adds little to
the development of the Internet.
3. IP addresses
Our IP address assignment procedure is now based on RFC 2050. JPNIC allocates blocks of addresses to member ISPs, and they assign the necessary amount of addresses to users. Member ISPs are obliged to perform assignment of small chunks of addresses of prefixes longer than 24 in many cases to attain desired usage rate, and, also, to manage “Degroot-type” DNS delegation. We made the current procedure effective on March. 1, and currently more than 80% of the total applications are resolved with address spaces smaller than one C class space.
