[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal: Whois Integrity Policy Proposal

[E. Westbrook]

Full disclosure: I am a non-RSA legacy holder, and I appreciate the
opportunity to comment here.

For the moment, I'll constrain these remarks to the suitability of this
proposal's language to its stated purpose and avoid conflating that with the
pros or cons of legacy RSA conversion itself.

Referring to the active paragraph of the proposal:

 To ensure the integrity of information in the ARIN WHOIS Database a
> resource must be under an RSA (either legacy or traditional) in order to
> update the WHOIS record.  ARIN will not update historical information in the
> ARIN Whois Database until the resource holder can prove the organization's
> right to the resource.
>

I find in these two sentences an implicit assumption that resource holders
cannot authenticate themselves sufficiently for whois updating purposes
without being under an RSA.  I find this assumption faulty.  Since there are
arguably many reliable mechanisms for authenticating a resource holder (thus
satisfying the stated motivation of the proposal), it would either be
ignorant or disingenuous to assert that it can only be done via an RSA.  In
fact, I fail to see how an RSA, in and of itself, would even satisfy the
stated motivation at all.

Secondly, unless I'm unaware of another affected group, I believe the only
resource holders that are not already under an RSA (and therefore affected
by this language) are exclusively the set of non-RSA legacy holders.

Therefore, the only possible result of this language that I can currently
fathom would be, in effect, the forcible conversion of non-RSA legacy
holders into RSA participants, under the misguided assertion of increased
whois update confidence.  Consequently, I'm afraid that I must conclude this
proposal is either fundamentally flawed at best, or a strong-arm sales
tactic at worst.

I therefore oppose this language and recommend the same to others.

I invite corrections of any misunderstandings under which I might be
speaking.

Best regards,
E. Westbrook
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/attachments/20080819/b5be598f/attachment.htm>