[ppml] Policy Proposal 2003-3: Residential Customer Privacy

[Stephen Sprunk]

Thus spake <Michael.Dillon at radianz.com>
> >ISPs with downstream residential customers may substitute
> >that ISP's name for the customer's name, e.g. 'Private
> >customer - XYZ Network', and the customer's street address
> >may read 'Private Residence.' Each private downstream residential
> >reassignment must have accurate upstream Abuse and Technical POCs
> >visible on the WHOIS record for that block.

Aside: Is there any objection to still requiring the city, postal code, and
country for "private residence" allocations?  That data is useful for many
things even without the street address.

> It's nice and short, it gets to the point and it is understandable.
> All good things. But it still is a waste of our time to deal with
> things like this. This proposal is picking nits, trying to solve a
> specific special case before we've dealt with the general problem.
> I suggest that we reject this proposal.

Privacy isn't a nit.

A serious debate about defining and restructuring the overall whois service
will take many months, if not years, and IMHO it's productive for ARIN to
make an affirmative policy regarding personal privacy in the meantime.

> There should be no mandatory email addresses tagged with labels like
> "abuse" which will likely lead to the email being /dev/nulled because that
> does not establish two-way communication with a human being.
>
> And this whois data should only be published when and if there are human
> beings at the other end who are ready, willing and able to do something
> about the communications that they may receive.

It is no more acceptable for objects to lack contact information than it is
for said information to be incorrect or useless.

This tangent is moot anyways because it's already common practice for ISPs
to list their own contacts for residential customers; the only question at
hand is whether the customer's name and address must be publicly attached to
the assignment itself.

> Yes, it would be good to regularly poll these contacts and to flag the
> ones that appear to be getting stale and remove the ones that no longer
> connect.

Per Andrew Dul, the AC is already working on a data-validation proposal.

S

Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking