[ppml] Policy Proposal 2004-6: Privacy of Reassignment Inform ation

[Gregory Massel]

The crux of this issue is that re-assignment information contains a perfect
contact list for most of an ISP's customers. Many ISPs consider this to be
sensitive information and do not wish for it to fall into the hands of their
competitors.

At the moment there is very little stopping ISPs from setting up rwhois
servers and filtering them such that only ARIN can access them. This may be
against policy, however, it is happening on quite a large scale, which
indicates widespread demand for this information to be considered private.

I support this policy proposal, however, question why the entity's upstream
organisations should have access? In many cases ISPs compete with their
upstream provider making the client information quite confidential. In any
case, their upstream provider has the most powerful tool imaginable to
ensure that the downstream honors abuse complaints: it can simply disconnect
them! I would argue that re-assignment information should only be accessible
to ARIN unless designated public.

Exception may need to be considered in the case where an ISP makes an
sub-allocation to another ISP. Ideally, one would want to have contact
details for the downstream ISP so that abuse queries don't have to traverse
a heirarchy of abuse desks.