[address-policy-wg] regarding housecleaning efforts in absurdum

On 14 Aug 2013, at 15:38, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se> wrote:

> RIPE NCC is now saying they're going to de-register the PI network and reclaim it because transfer documents for the handover done 13 years ago can't be produced.
> 
> I think this is wrong.

+1.

OTOH the company which originally got the space still exists. So there's no obvious reason why some sort of paperwork can't be produced to give the NCC enough of a comfort level to get these resources transferred to their current user/operator.

> There should be some kind of statue of limitation on time for producing documents.

I disagree.

For one thing, whatever time limit gets chosen -- good luck getting consensus on that! -- will be abitrary. And anyone hoping to sneakily inherit/acquire space would just need to wait until that time interval had passed before claiming "lack of documentation" as the pretext for changing a MNT object or whatever.

That said, these sorts of historical issues do crop up from time to time and can usually be solved. For the case you outlined, it seems like some common sense needs to be applied and/or there's been a misunderstanding or two along the way. IMO that's not strong enough justification for making a policy change.

> The dispute isn't between the original company and the current operational holder, the dispute is solely between RIPE NCC and the current operational holder.

Without knowing the specific details, it's hard to know if that's the case or not. IIUC, in these cases the NCC generally tries to take a more pragmatic approach. Surely there's somebody at the original company who can put something in writing to confirm that the address space moved when the network was transferred all those years ago? For all we know an officer of that company might have been in contact with the NCC and told a different story from the one given by the current user of the space.