[ppml] Policy Proposal 2004-4: Purpose and scope of ARIN Whois Directory

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Mon Mar 29 14:03:39 EST 2004


>>> 7. The records mentioned in item 6 will not identify the organization
> or
>>>    individual receiving the address block or their exact location.
> These
>>>    records will only indicate an organizational type, the nearest
>>>    municipality providing postal service to the end user,
> state/province
>>>    and country.
>
>> I have serious problems with this, and, I think paragraph 7 should be
>> stricken from this policy.  I think that the combination of paragraph 6
>> and paragraph 4 more than adequately addresses this issue without any
>> need for preventing good data from being available in paragraph 7.
>
> I don't understand your objections here.If we strike paragraph
> 7 then we have nothing to specify what is in these entries. An ISP
> could comply simply by listing the CIDR block that was allocated
> and no other information at all.
>
Are we talking about the same paragraph 7 above?  As I read the
paragraph, it doesn't do anything to require information, simply prohibits
certain information from being placed in the data.  I quote:

	"The records mentioned in item 6 will not identify the organization
	or individual receiving the address block or their exact location."

While I understand that there has been some support for residential customer
privacy rules, this goes far beyond that contemplated in any
of the proposals that have received support.  I think the required contents
of a whois record are adequately addressed in other policies.  However, if
you don't, and your intent here is to require certain things, then, I think
paragraph 7 is in need of a pretty major rewrite.

> This is an area where I think we need to be explicit and
> unambiguous. 6 and 7 do not refer to contact info, but to
> data published by ISPs that says, "here is the extent of our
> network", "this is where we are connecting sites to the global
> public Internet and how big they are". I'd actually like to see
> the ISPs get together and agree on some notation for these entries
> that would allow for better statistical analyses than we have
> today.
>
OK... That's not how I understood the policy, and, I think if you re-read it
from the frame of reference described above you will see that there is
significant ambiguity in what 6 and 7 were referring to.  I still think
there is no need to prohibit the ISPs from including details.  I don't
like making them optional, but, there seems to be community support for
that.  However, there's a big difference between a right to privacy and
enforced annonymity.


> You might want to reread points c), g), i) and j) in the notes
> attached to the proposed policy wording.
>
I might.  However, the notes, as I understand it, do not take on the force
of policy, and, as such, the policy is sufficiently ambiguous that I think
it should be fixed.

Owen

-- 
If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/attachments/20040329/f0763956/attachment.sig>


More information about the ARIN-PPML mailing list