[ppml] Policy Proposal 2006-6: Bulk WHOIS agreement expiration clarification

[Member Services]

On April 20, 2006, the ARIN Advisory Council (AC) concluded its review
of 'Bulk WHOIS agreement expiration clarification' and accepted it as a
formal policy proposal for discussion by the community. The AC is also
forwarding the matter to the ARIN Board of Trustees for its consideration.

The proposal is designated Policy Proposal 2006-6: Bulk WHOIS agreement
expiration clarification. The proposal text is below and can be found at:
http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2006_6.html

All persons in the community are encouraged to discuss Policy Proposal
2006-6 in the weeks leading to the ARIN Public Policy Meeting in St.
Louis scheduled for October 11-12, 2006. Both the discussion on the
Public Policy Mailing List and at the Public Policy Meeting will be used
to determine the community consensus regarding this policy proposal.

The ARIN Internet Resource Policy Evaluation Process can be found at:
http://www.arin.net/policy/irpep.html

ARIN's Policy Proposal Archive can be found at:
http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/proposal_archive.html

Regards,

Member Services
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)


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Policy Proposal Name: Bulk WHOIS agreement expiration clarification

Author: Bill Woodcock

Proposal Version: 1.0

Proposal type: Modify

Policy term: Permanent

Policy statement:

Text added to the end of "3.1. Bulk Copies of ARIN's WHOIS":

If no term of validity or expiration date is included in the policy or
AUP, it shall be deemed valid upon acceptance by ARIN and shall conclude
after thirty days notice by ARIN, immediately upon cancellation by the
other signatory, or immediately upon a violation of its terms. If an
expiration date is included, ARIN shall provide thirty days notice prior
to the expiration of an AUP agreement, in order that the data recipient
shall have the opportunity to receive uninterrupted service.

Rationale:

Presently, there is no expiration date specified in either the AUP
agreement nor in the policy. ARIN whois data recipients receive an FTP
login to an ARIN server, which unexpectedly stops working one day,
breaking lots of scripts, causing gaps in datasets, and causing people
to waste a lot of time debugging, only to find that the login has been
deactivated with no forewarning.  If ARIN staff are going to arbitrarily
decide to "expire" an agreement which has no defined expiration, doing
so unilaterally and without notice is an extraordinarily bad idea.

Let me just say that I think it's really pitiful that we should need to
use the policy process to micromanage operations at this level. But
believe me, I wouldn't be wasting my time writing something this trivial
if it weren't necessary to solve an actual problem.

Timetable for implementation: Immediate.