In June 2003, right after the June Nanog Conference (this is rather significant), Chris Morrow of UUnet requested rather abruptly that two /21 blocks to be returned. We disputed that UUnet owned the blocks, and demonstrated evidence of ownership of 198.3.136/21. Apparently, this is in response to Alan Brown's false claims that the blocks were hijacked. ARIN records indicated that they were assigned to UUnet, and we were previously a long-time UUnet customer.

The June 2003 Nanog was attended by Chris Morrow. It is likely that Kai Schlitchting, Alan Brown and Matthew Sullivan participated through IRC chat channels. Kai Schlichting simultaneously sent a defamatory letter to the Open Group during a confrontation with SORBS.NET operator Matthew Sullivan.

We corresponded with an Attorney from UUnet on the matter. It turned out that the one block that did belong to UUnet wasn't due to be returned to UUnet until Febuary, 2004. And we found that Morrow had no business making the request. Morrow violated other policies of UUnet, such as creating blackhole routes to these blocks during the dispute over ownership, after acknowledging the dispute (a legal no-no). Morrow was forced to remove the blackhole routes, which he wasn't authorized to create in the first place.

Morrow was subsequently transferred from operations to "Customer Router Security" or some such. No doubt, some zealot will say Dean Anderson caused Chris Morrow to be transferred. But if it was punishment (and its not clear it was), then it was because of something Chris Morrow did or didn't do--the violation of UUnet policies may have been a factor. Chris Morrow is responsible for his own actions.

As discovered in the dispute, there was a problem with the supernet record for one block, which was apparently created when someone at UUnet mistakenly thought they hadn't transferred parts of this block to anyone else. ARIN has no data for this supernet record. Its creation is something of a mystery. In the pre-CIDR era when Class C's from the198.3.x.x block was allocated (1992, 1993, 1994), it was practice to transfer the space permanently to each customer. Our research found several other businesses with blocks in this range that were still in existance. Surely, UUnet didn't intend to steal this space back. But UUnet hasn't cooperated with any other companies which obtained the space prior to 1994.

UUnet transferred 8 Class C blocks to Open Environment Corporation (OEC) in Febuary, 1993, documented in the form of official Transfer requests. This was before there was a notion of "portable/non-portable" address space. In the early days of the internet, all addresses were "portable", classful, and transferred to the organization connecting to the internet. Classful routing eventually resulted in oversized route tables and routers running out of memory. To compensate, the notion of CIDR was introduced in November of 1993, and the modern practice of being assigned addresses from an ISP began. Sometime after Novemeber of 1993, UUnet told ARIN or its predecessor that it hadn't transferred any of the Class C's in the 198.3 group. This was wrong. ARIN can't identify the origin of the /16 record, but does have SRI records of 256 Class C's being allocated to UUnet in 1992. And we do have the records of UUnet transferring the 198.3.136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143 to OEC. OEC was bought by Borland and the corporation is still operated by Borland as of 2004, and ultimately, the blocks were transferred to Av8 Internet.

Morrow appears to repeated this information to Alan Brown in violation of the confidentiality provisions employment contract with UUnet. UUnet lawyers confirmed that employees have confidentiality obligations, and that Morrow had no authorization to make public this information. Brown made several posts containing non-public information. In particular, he appears to have misunderstood the request to ARIN to show documentation of the CIDR block request.. This conversation however was not public and was conducted between UUnet, ARIN, and Av8 and involved their counsel.

ARIN never did explain who created the supernet block, but we were able to show the transfer forms with the help of UUnet and Chris Morrow. Morrow provided them as "proof" that the blocks belonged to UUnet. Unfortunately, in his own version of "ready, fire, aim", he gave us the irrefutable evidence we needed to close the dispute in our favor. We were still searching for this information. He was not so helpful to other companies who requested copies of their transfer forms, even though he acknowledged that UUnet has a complete archive record of all these transactions.

ARIN has broken up the 198.3 block, and has set the Av8 block back to "portable", or in the ARIN terms, "direct allocation".