[anti-abuse-wg] RIPE NCC to set abuse-c for remaining organisation with ASNs or other resources allocated or assigned by the RIPE NCC

Dear working groups,

As you know all organisations that have internet number resources allocated or assigned by the RIPE NCC need to have an abuse-c attribute according to policy 2011-06. The following implementation plan was communicated for this policy:

https://labs.ripe.net/Members/kranjbar/implementation-details-of-policy-2011-06

Phase 1 of this plan was completed in December 2013, setting up abuse-c for then existing LIRs. Phase 2 of this plan was completed for organisations holding sponsored PI resources in November 2014. However, since then LIRs and end-users have been responsible for ensuring that an abuse-c exists for their organisation. In practice it has proven difficult to enforce this, since abuse-c is not a mandatory attribute in the RIPE DB schema, and as a result new cases where organisations do not have an abuse contact have been created.

There is an important change in the implementation we would like to do – based on our experiences thus far – which would like the community's mandate on. We propose to use the end-user organisation's email address instead of the sponsoring LIR email address. We believe there are valid reasons for this change, but of course if this suggested change is controversial we would encourage discussing it in the anti-abuse working group. Ideally, we need to have a decision on this by early January so that we can prepare the work.


1) Prevent NEW cases

We want to ensure that no new cases will be created as follows:

= Since 1 March, the new member application form already provides much better integration with the RIPE Database
  - because of this an abuse contact is now created whenever a new LIR is activated
  - it can be modified the LIR, e.g. using web-updates, but not removed

= We are currently adapting the new create organisation webupdates form to include abuse-c by default allowing the user to:
  - reference an existing abuse-c role object, or
  - enter an email address to create an abuse-c role for the organisation (using the same maintainer)

= We are also adapting the edit organisation webupdates form to always suggest adding an abuse-c contact if it's not present

= We plan to extend the new request forms:
  - check that an end-user organisation has abuse-c before it can be used
  - if not, refer to the edit form for the organisation where it will be easy to add reference an existing abuse contact, or create a new object

2) Resolve remaining EXISTING cases

Originally the idea for phase 2 was to use the sponsoring LIR's email address in case the end-user organisation was unresponsive to requests to set their own abuse contact. However, since then policy 2012-08 has been implemented and nowadays the sponsoring LIR, and its abuse contact, can be found through the sponsoring-org attribute. 

Also, the RIPE NCC found that using the sponsoring organisation's email address leads to a number of issues:

- end-users have no incentive to set their own abuse-c, rather then letting abuse questions go to their sponsor, so the majority remains unresponsive
- in case an end-user has resources from more than one sponsor it is ambiguous which sponsor's email should be used
- many LIRs were unpleasantly surprised by finding their email address in the abuse-c of the organisation they sponsor
- in case LIRs no longer wish to sponsor resources, or when they are returned, existing references to their email in the end-user abuse-c are not cleaned up

We would therefore like to propose a change to the implementation plan when addressing the remaining cases. Today, in case no abuse contact is set, users of the database will resort to using the organisation's default email. Therefore, adding a dedicated abuse-c role object using this email address, doesn't cause any noticeable new effects on organisations. It may well be the correct email address to use for an organisation, and no action would be required. However, it *enables* an organisation to use a different email address for abuse questions if appropriate.

We would like to email remaining LIRs, and end-user organisations and sponsoring LIRs on Monday 1 February, giving them until Monday 15 February to set their abuse contact. We realise that this means we would have another delay, but we believe that it would be unwise to do this change over the end of year holiday period, and to ensure that we can give proper support to questions we want to avoid doing this at the same time as the start of the year invoicing.

Please let us know what you think.

Kind regards,

Tim Bruijnzeels
Assistant Manager Software Engineering
RIPE NCC Database Group