[ppml] /29 limit for ARIN SWIP whois

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:ppml-bounces at arin.net]On Behalf Of
>michael.dillon at bt.com
>Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 12:41 AM
>To: ppml at arin.net
>Subject: Re: [ppml] /29 limit for ARIN SWIP whois
>
>
>Is it bad for David to take full responsibility for traffic
>emanating from his address space?
>

No.  However, experience has shown that the majority of ISP's
that don't publish detailed SWIPS also don't take responsibility
for their network blocks.

David may be perfectly willing to read and respond to all
complaints for his entire netblock.  But will his successor?

You see, the reason we have laws and policies in place is
that there's 3 general types of people in the world:

1) Those who understand the intent of a thing and go over and
beyond the stated requirements to satisfy the intent.  For
example if I purchase something at Sak's Fifth Avenue and
a couple months later I have a problem with it, I have no
doubt that Saks will go well beyond the legal requirements
to make sure I'm happy with it.

2) Those who understand the intent of the thing but will only
bestir themselves to do the minimum that is required.  For
example, the accounting student who is angry that he got
a 75% score on his CPA exam, because 75% is 5% more than 
the minimum needed to pass - and he is upset that he had
to do the extra work that got him the 5%

3) Those who may or may not understand the intent of the
thing but are selfish and don't give a rat's ass about what
the rest of the world thinks, or how their own actions
may inconvenience the rest of the people in the world, and
are just going to do whatever they want - and if it's illegal,
they are going to figure out a way to hide the fact they
are doing it.  For example, the guy that downloads pirated
DVD's and rationalizes to himself that the movie studios
have lots of money, so what he's doing isn't stealing. Or,
for example, the ISP that publishes only a single POC for his
netblocks, then dumps all the complaints to that address
into /dev/null because he's too busy to respond to them.

No policy in the world will make the folks in camp #3
do the right thing.  David may be in camp #1, but we have
to write policy for camp #2, we can't write it for camp #1.

>> For the rest of us who have a modicum of responsibility, in the
>> #1 camp, clearly SWIPS aren't doing the job.  I will point out that
>> they aren't even doing the job for the RIR.  If they were, then
>> the RIR would not allow people to submit spreadsheets and such
>> as evidence of utilization.
>
>I agree. SWIP (Shared WHOIS Information Project) is broken.
>WHOIS itself is broken. RWHOIS (Remote WHOIS) is broken.
>In the past, I have proposed a step to fix this problem
>but I see no proposal from you.
>

I don't see any point of a policy change.  The current /29 is quite
obviously now a political compromise between the people who
want to do the right thing, and the people who have to be
prodded to do the right thing, regardless of whatever it started
out to be.  The people who are in camp #1
have already gone into the over and above effort to field
their own rwhois servers and make the /32 allocations available
for perusal, they aren't being constrained by the SWIP limitations.

Ted