Dear Rosemary, Holly, Izumi, and Colleagues, I support improvements to the language for the description of ICANN's mission with respect to the numbers function.
Coordinates the allocation and assignment at the top-most level of Internet Protocol ("IP") and Autonomous System ("AS") numbers.
The CIDRD WG produced a draft-ietf-cidrd-private-addr, adopted as RFC 1918 in early 1996, also known as BCP 5. In consequence, the IANA reserved three address blocks: 10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16 in CIDR notation. Additionally, while ARIN (1997) is roughly contemporanious with ICANN (1998), allocation and assignment of address blocks and Autonomus System Numbers, like allocation of domain names, took place before the formation of that entity. I suggest that the text could be improved by wordsmithing that would incidate that ICANN's mission w.r.t. the numbers function, that is, the constituent exercise of allocation and assignment by the entities which form the NRO, and so the ASO, continues the general policy of allocation and assignment developed prior to the incorporations of either ICANN or ARIN, as well as allocations and assignments made by the IETF. Thank you for your patience, Eric Brunner-Williams Eugene, Oregon