[address-policy-wg] 2006-04 New Draft Document Published (Contact e-mail Address Requirements)

> We have published a draft document for the proposal described in
> 2006-04.

>From the draft document:
    By making the wording of the existing policy about
    contact information in the RIPE Database more explicit,
    we should see less spam and abuse and more rapid
    correction in network operations.

I question the logic of this proposal. While I also 
would like to see less spam and more rapid correction
of network operational issues, I do not believe that
this policy addresses these problems at all. A spammer
that wants to comply with this policy change merely
needs to maintain an abuse contact that delivers all
complaints to an email robot which discards them in
the same way that the RIPE hostmaster robot discards
queries from unknown email addresses.

But the policy has a larger problem. It attempts to
place a stricter requirement on every organization 
which has received an assignment from a RIPE member.
In this way it places a requirement on virtually
every organization, commercial and non-commercial,
which exists within our society. I do not believe
that this is justified and I do not believe that
most organizations have any real role to play in 
preventing spam or correcting network operational
issues.

The real issue here is that current RIPE policies
allow RIPE members to wash their hands of all
network operational issues associated with the
addresses which they have assigned to other
organizations. It would be far better to fix this
policy by making it clear that there is one and
only one organization responsible for network
operational issues related to an allocated block
and that is the RIPE member who received the 
allocation. If they want to have internal processes
and contractual agreements that delegate some of
that responsibility, that is OK, but they must
nevertheless remain the primary point of contact.
RIPE can impose an obligation on organizations
who have received an allocation directly from
RIPE and it can easily police such an obligation.
But once 3rd parties enter the situation, RIPE can
only make a lot of noise and create policies that
have no teeth which no one really has to follow.

The rules and policies surrounding the RIPE database
are part of the tradition that we have been blindly
following since the days of the ARPAnet when it was
neccessary to record all users of the network in 
order to justify budget allocations. The network
climate has change around us but the policies have
not sufficiently evolved to meet the new environment.

--Michael Dillon