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.