[ppml] Policy Proposal: Modification to Reverse Mapping Policy

[David Schwartz]

Michael Dillon wrote:

> > Why should ARIN give out referalls to servers that
> > *intentionally* timeout?

> Because ARIN's customer asks them to do this.

That can justify providing services to a spammer, after all, they ask you to
do so.

> > Why should ARIN be a party in wasting other people's time and
> > resources?

> Because the people whose resources are being wasted are customers of the
> organization which intentionally has their servers timeout.

Not so. I may or may not be an ARIN customer if I'm reverse resolving an IP
address assigned by ARIN.

> About a year ago, I was called in to help sort out a major incident for
> a customer of ours. Our customer was providing a service over the
> network to hundreds of their customers. This service was delivered by an
> application which their customers ran. One day last year, hundreds of
> these customers were unable to login to the service at the beginning of
> the day.
>
> The cause? Verisign, in their wisdom, had cleaned up a bunch of lame
> delegations in the .com zone by replacing the registered nameservers
> with two nameservers in lame-delegation.org. The application that our
> customer provides their customers, depends on a certain domain being
> lame, and when it did not get the correct error, it was unable to
> connect to it's servers.
>
> That's right, I said CORRECT ERROR. I didn't design the application, but
> that is how it works. The solution was to put back the lame delegation
> in the .com zone, and then to transfer the registration to another
> registrar who will ensure that the lame delegation is left untouched in
> the future.

So long as the address space involved doesn't connect to people who aren't
in on this scheme, I have no problem. If they do, this is simply an abuse of
the cooperation necessary to make the Internet work. It is morally in the
same category as a business model based on spam. You make other people do
extra work simply because you can, even though it's outside the scope of the
implied agreement that connects them to you.

Though I do agree that this is sufficiently minor that it shouldn't policed
by ARIN.

Let me make it clear that I don't think it's sensible to try to create a
policy that can, by robotic mindless operation perfectly handle every
situation. However, ARIN should police its delegations at least minimally to
curtail what is actual abuse.

The policy should give ARIN the power to deal with the cases that are really
bad and the descretion to allow the cases that are borderline or obviously
okay. The policy should tell ARIN customers that delegation of a zone is a
promise to properly serve those zones, and a promise that other people will
rely on.

DS