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• + Preface
• + Chapter1 Resource Management and Registry
  • Difference between management of IP addresses and domain names
  • Operation of IP address registry
  • Value of domain name as character string
  • Operation of domain name registry
  • Role of registry
• + Chapter2 Resource management before JNIC and JPNIC
  • How domain name management started
  • Start of IP address management
  • From JNIC to JPNIC
  • Column: Network groups involved in establishment of JNIC/JPNIC
• + Chapter3 Restructuring toward fully-fledged resource management by JPNIC
  • Center of the Internet community
  • Dispatching information as a Network Information Center
  • Column: Logo of JPNIC
  • Consideration to fee and membership structure of JPNIC
  • Relocation of the office along with the expansion of service
  • Incorporation of JPNIC
• + Chapter4 Transition of resource management policy for domain names
  • Coping with expansion of the Internet through policy development
  • Deployment of Geographic Type JP and its reconstruction into Prefecture Type JP
  • Introduction of ED.JP for elementary and secondary education institutions
  • Separation of NE.JP and GR.JP from OR.JP
  • Establishment of JP domain name registration rule
• + Chapter5 IP address policy in the fully-fledged Internet age
  • IP address management before the commercial Internet
  • Column: Routing
  • Two concerns regarding the commercial Internet
  • IPv6 as next-generation Internet protocol
  • Coming of CIDR age
  • Column: IP address notation based on CIDR
  • Economical use of IPv4 addresses with classless technology
• + Chapter6 Building the global IP address management structure
  • Departure from overconcentration at The NIC
  • APNIC Pilot Project
  • Establishment of three RIR framework
  • RIR-NIR-LIR framework
  • Column: Assignment Window
  • Transition of IP address policy development framework
  • Effort to establish global framework
• + Chapter7 Framework for global domain name management led by ICANN
  • Finding a domain name management framework for new era
  • Column: Green Paper and White Paper
  • Decision-making process and organizational structure adopted in ICANN
  • Involvement from Japan
  • ICANN's gTLD policy reforms
  • Column: Registry-registrar model and JP Registrar model ? “thick” registry and “thin” registry
  • New gTLDs
  • Relationship between IP address and ICANN
  • Epicenter of Internet governance
• + Chapter8 General-use JP Domain Name and establishment of JPRS
  • Limitations imposed by the organization’s form as an incorporated association
  • JP-DRP
  • General-use JP Domain Name
  • Establishment of JPRS
  • Starting General-Use JP Domain Name Service
  • Towards transfer of management and administration of JP domain name
• + Chapter9 “Publication” and “disclosure” of registration information
  • Registry mechanism to register and publish registration data
  • Spread of the Internet and registration information
  • Discussion on the handling of registration information
  • Organization/group information
  • Responding to Personal Information Protection Act
  • Reference: Documents on handling registration information
• + Chapter10 IPv4 address pool exhaustion and IPv6
  • IPv6 emerging on the Internet
  • Efforts of Japan towards IPv6 promotion
  • Expansion of the Internet through IPv4
  • Accelerated IPv4 address consumption through penetration of continuous connections
  • IPv4 address pool exhaustion becomes more of a reality
  • IPv4 address pool exhaustion and IPv6 educational activity
  • IPv4 address policy in the face of exhaustion
  • Internet over IPv6 after IPv4 exhaustion
• + Appendix1: IP address and domain name
• + Appendix2: Transition of Internet resource management
• + About History Compilation Team
• + Revision history

Because of the explosive expansion of the Internet after the 1990s, IP address use and routing technology required significant reforms, which led to a drastic change of IP address management policy.

IP address management before the commercial Internet

The Internet of the 1980s was a research network mainly used in the U.S. Its scale was extremely small compared with the Internet as we now know it, and it was used only for things such as joint operation of super computers, information sharing and other exchange among researchers.

In the beginning, Internet protocol (IP) related parameters were managed personally by Jon Postel of the University of Southern California. With the gradual increase in the number of Internet users, Postel looked to his colleagues for additional management support, and this loose arrangement came to be called the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA). At that time, there was only a simple rule that said “if you need protocol parameters, you should contact Postel.”^[93]

IPv4 addresses in those days were divided into three types: Class A, B and C, indicated by the value of the leading 4 bits. Each class was designated a different size of “network address” to be assigned to connected networks: Class A contained 24-bit network addresses (able to hold approximately 17 million hosts), Class B addresses were 16-bit (able to hold approximately 66,000 hosts), and Class C addresses were 8-bit (able to hold 254 hosts)^[94]. These addresses were called “classful addresses,” and the unit of routing was automatically identified by the value of the leading 4 bits.

In the beginning, the number of computers that needed to be connected was small, and there seemed little prospect of a significant increase in the number. Therefore, IP addresses were assigned fairly liberally, in such a way that Postel assigned Class A addresses with huge address space capable of holding about 17 million hosts to large businesses and universities.

Two concerns regarding the commercial Internet

Commercial Internet service providers appeared in the U.S. around 1990^[96], and Internet access became available to general users for a fee. With this move, the Internet started to be used widely by the general public, moving beyond its research and academic origins. Accordingly, the Internet – and the number of Internet users – began to expand exponentially.

Directly after the appearance of commercial providers, the following issues became a concern among relevant parties all over the world^[97]:

• Finite nature of IPv4 addresses – Exhaustion of available address pool might occur in the near future.
• Limitation of routing mechanism – When the total number of routes exceeds the number that the Internet as a whole can handle, the routing mechanism might break down.

To address these concerns, the IETF established the Routing and Addressing (ROAD) Group in 1991^[98] and started to work on countermeasures.

IPv6 as next-generation Internet protocol

One radical approach to countering the finite nature of the IPv4 address pool was to develop a next-generation IP (Internet protocol) in anticipation of IPv4 exhaustion. The ROAD Group had investigated some protocols as candidates for the next-generation IP, and the IAB made a proposal for the use of a protocol based on the Connection-Less Network Protocol (CLNP), defined by ISO for the next-generation IP, as IP version 7 in June 1992^[99][100]. However, the IETF could not go along with the proposal and denied it. Taking that incident as a trigger, the IETF established the IPng (Internet Protocol Next Generation) Working Group and started a full-scale study of the next-generation IP. Additional protocol candidates were suggested, some candidates were integrated, and active discussions were held. As a result, a protocol called Simple IP Plus (SIPP) was adopted as the next-generation IP in 1994. After that, the detailed parts were discussed, and the basic specification of IP version 6 (IPv6) based on SIPP was published as RFC 1883^[101] in December 1995^[102].

Predictions were also made as to when the pool of available IPv4 addresses would exhaust. The Address Lifetime Expectation (ALE) Working Group^[103] of the IETF concluded in July 1995 that the pool would be depleted in “2013±eight years.” This prediction was right with regard to exhaustion of the IANA global address pool (February 2011)^[104] followed by APNIC (April 2011)^[105], RIPE NCC (September 2012)^[106] and LACNIC (June 2014)^[107] that had already occurred at the time of writing this document^[108].

Coming of CIDR age

As mid-term measures to cope with the finite nature of IPv4 addresses, amendment of the IPv4 address distribution procedure was promoted, together with measures relating to the routing mechanism.

The size of the networks connected to the Internet varied widely. When using classful addresses as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, even the 8-bit space of a Class C address (capable of holding 254 hosts) was too big for a small organization, and there was almost no connected organization that required the 24-bit space of a Class A address (capable of holding approximately 17 million hosts). Therefore, it was obvious that the address usage scheme was inefficient. Furthermore, when the number of new organizations connecting to the Internet increased rapidly, the number of routes increased rapidly too, resulting in a burden for the routing mechanism. So the breakdown of the routing itself became another practical concern. To mitigate the increase in the number of routes, Class B addresses were assigned to organizations requiring several Class C addresses, thereby giving priority to route aggregation over effective usage of available address space.

The eventual solution to this challenge was so-called “classless” routing. This technology enables routing protocols to carry the prefix length (the size of the routing unit) as routing information, as well as the IP addresses.

Classless technology enabled ISPs to summarize multiple separate pieces of routing information from their connected networks into a single public route, so that the routing information could be advertised to other ISPs in bulk. This is called route aggregation. For instance, if one ISP has the address block ranging from 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255 and advertises it in a classful way without aggregation, 256 Class C addresses are advertised. On the contrary, if the ISP adopts classless technology, 256 /24 blocks are summarized into one lump, and a single piece of routing information noting 192.168.0.0/16 is advertised. In this way the amount of routing information to be advertised among ISPs can be reduced significantly, and the burden on the Internet as a whole can be lessened. Routing in units of ISP aggregations with classless technology is called Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR). CIDR was standardized in RFC 1518^[110] in September 1993.

In CIDR, it is necessary to distribute consecutive IP addresses to an ISP to enable aggregation. JPNIC addressed that need immediately and in November 1993, shortly after the publication of RFC 1518, it started distributing (allocating) consecutive IP addresses to JPNIC members, so that the addresses could be re-distributed (assigned) to the organizations connected to those members^[111]. It was September 1995 when ISPs in Japan really started to aggregate routing information utilizing CIDR^[112]. The graph shown below (Fig. 5-1) indicates the amount of routing information advertised within Japan before and after the Japanese ISPs started routing aggregation with CIDR. It shows that aggregation contributed greatly to the reduction in the amount of routing information.

With CIDR, a new concept of hierarchical routing was introduced to the Internet. Before CIDR, IP addresses were assigned without considering how they related to other networks, and networks had freedom to choose the party to which they connected. However, since the introduction of CIDR, IP addresses are basically assigned from the address block of the ISP that provides connectivity, meaning that a change in ISP requires a change in addressing. In other words, while CIDR brought scalability to the Internet, it came at the cost of some flexibility.

Economical use of IPv4 addresses with classless technology

Classless technology enabled address assignments in units smaller than a Class C address, and JPNIC started making sub-Class C assignments in September 1995^[113]. This made it possible to assign address spaces of an appropriate size, economically, to organizations ranging from very small groups to large-scale enterprises for which one Class C address was not sufficient.

As described above, CIDR technology is now indispensable for the economical usage of IPv4 addresses. However, it did not come about simply through routing aggregation by ISPs and block allocation by registries.

To start assigning in units smaller than a Class C address, the issue of setting reverse name servers had to be addressed. In the case of classful addressing, the PTR record (a DNS resource record used for reverse lookup) could be configured by just following the basic condition under which d.c.b.a.in-addr.arpa corresponded to the IP address of a.b.c.d. However, when IP addresses are assigned in units smaller than a Class C address, c.b.a.in-addr.arpa would be shared by multiple different organizations. To handle this, JPNIC published a document^[114] at the start of the assignment and described an applicable configuration method for reverse names using CNAME record (a DNS resource record for specifying that the domain name is an alias of another, canonical domain name). Moreover, the subnet mask with the values of all zeros or all ones (all-0 subnet, all-1 subnet) could not be used on some hosts that followed the old implementation. This made it necessary to check the software of the hosts on the concerned network before starting such subnetting³⁷.

The purpose of CIDR addressing was not only to aggregate multiple Class C addresses, but to also allow the allocation of Class A addresses with the same subnetting technique. RFC 1797 “Class A Subnet Experiment”^[115] issued in April 1995, singled out 39/8 (a Class A address) and made it available for experimental usage. The RFC specified that all ASes could use /24 addresses from that block by representing the value of the AS number in the second and third octets. At the end of the experiment it was confirmed that there were no major problems in such usage. After that, IANA started to allocate /8 addresses out of the Class A pool to RIRs in 1996, and each RIR began allocating the addresses to LIRs as a pilot project^[116].

In this way, the technical community of the Internet had responded to the rapidly increasing demand for the Internet in terms of routing technology and IP address distribution, gaining the cooperation of ISPs and end users.