Mailing List for NCC Referrals to Network Service Providers

[Daniel Karrenberg <]

As a NIC of the last resort the NCC is getting requests from prospective
European Internet users on how to connect and consequently which service
provider to use.  Of course we strive to give complete and unbiased
information to people contacting us.  Thus far we have been working with
a list of service providers based on information sent to us after
earlier polls.  This is cumbersome because:

	The list is sparsely populated and never up-to-date.

	Entries often do not have comparable information.

	People calling on the phone often want a specific
	recommendation and cannot understand that we are
	not able to give that as the NCC has to remain 
	impartial vis a vis the different providers.

In order to overcome those problems I propose to get any requesters into
contact with all potential suppliers as quickly as possible.  The best
way to achieve this is to set up a mailing list of all IP service
providers and to post all referral requests that reach the NCC on that
list.  This way all providers get the address of the prospective
customer at the same time and can get in touch with them however they
see fit.  The whole process is streamlined and the NCC stays out of the
loop as much as possible to avoid any bias. 

The proposed name of the list is ip-provs@localhost. Any IP service provider 
can subscribe to it by sending a request to ip-provs-request@localhost.
The list is *not* intended for any discussion whatsoever.

If anyone in RIPE thinks this should not be done, please speak up so that a
discussion can be started. If no serious objections are recieved the NCC
will proceed as described.

Daniel