[address-policy-wg] 2005-08 New Policy Proposal

> Would there be any real value in registering private users in Whois? 
> How likely is it that the end user could provide assistance to 
> whoever contacted them?

Finally we are getting to the heart of the question which
is about administrative procedure, i.e. policies, not
about technology.

The technology specifies that a "network" should be assigned
a /64 but this thing called a "network" may not be an
Ethernet broadcast domain. Different people will do different
things with devices and this will lead them to use different
address allocation strategies. For instance, consider an
RS-232 cable daisychained through a factory with modems to
handle the signal strength amplification when the signal
gets too strong. Imagine 10 devices attached to this daisy
chained RS 232 cable which use IPv6 to communicate. One
might consider this a network or one might not.

Is this decision a public policy decision or not?

It really depends on where one puts the boundary between
the public domain of the RIR and the private domain of the
end user. Where should this boundary be? Is the current
definition of the boundary too fuzzy? Does the RIR database
contain more detail than it should because of the fuzziness
of this boundary? Is the current definition of the boundary 
too tightly aligned with the 1990's world of ISPs and end
users where ISPs use PDH and SDH networks while end users
use Ethernet?

What should go in the RIR database? What should stay out of
the database because it is nobody else's business?

--Michael Dillon