[address-policy-wg] 2022-02 New Policy Proposal (Remove mandatory IPv4 PA assignment registration in the RIPE Database)

Hi Sander,

Thanks for your point of view.

> Justifying getting more PA Allocations was never the reason to document PA Assignments in the RIPE database. Its purpose is to document who to contact for administrative and technical issues concerning the IP addresses. Being able to use that data to verify that IP addresses are actually in use before allocating more was just a useful side effect.

I agree that it is a side effect of the main goal. But I see that as the only reason why this current policy is still standing. That is why a big part of the policy proposal is about this and not to mislead people. 

> I therefore oppose this rationale. I know that organisations are lazy and only properly document assignments when they want the benefits for themselves (i.e. getting another allocation). I think there is a more important decision to make here: do we still want this level of documentation for operational purposes?
> 
> If we don’t want/need this level of documentation anymore then sure, remove the mandatory PA assignment registration in the RIPE DB. But in that case rewrite the proposal to make that very explicit. Removing the requirement using the wrong arguments is misleading. Call it what it is.


The main goal of the policy is to update it on the current situation and what is already happening in practice and to give more freedom to the LIR to decide how far in detail they want to register their (sub-)allocations in the RIPE DB. Of course, there needs to be always enough information for sufficient information gathering for things like abuse. This is already written down in the RIPE Database Terms and Conditions and the Abuse Contact Management in the RIPE Database policy. Getting another allocation is not possible anymore for IPv4.  

There are a lot of different situations imaginable with all their specific needs for the level of information. This you already can see back in the findings of the Database taskforce. So the question is do we want to update the policy to the current situation and still fill in enough information for abuse e.g. or do we want to enforce the current situation back to the policy? 

Feel free to let me know if the policy needs to be improved to show/explain better the goal of it. 

Kind regards,

Jeroen