[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal: Customer Confidentiality

[William Herrin]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Alexander,
Daniel<Daniel_Alexander at cable.comcast.com> wrote:
> Do you think the community needs to know the details of every
> user of the IP address space, or do they just need to know the
> contact information of those that are responsible for its use?

Daniel,

Let me put it to you this way: I don't own a gun. I don't want to own
a gun. I probably never will. But I strongly support the second
amendment because as archaic as it may seem, the fact of a well armed
populace plays an important role in keeping our governments from
straying too far.

I could care less who is currently using 199.33.224.1. If he's bugging
me, I'll drop his packets. But I do care about the transparency of the
address allocation process. Open records make it hard to cheat:
there's too much of a chance that some curious fellow will notice an
oddity in one of the records and trigger the audit that busts you. You
can cheat if you really want to but it takes some effort. Closed
records make cheating relatively easy: ARIN doesn't have the resources
to do any significant amount of auditing and we wouldn't want them to
if they did. Since no one else can see your records, you're just an
opaque block of consumption

In a world where we will very soon have too few IP addresses to go
around, the last thing we need to do is make it easier to cheat.



On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Aaron Wendel<aaron at wholesaleinternet.net> wrote:
> [The proposal] still allows you
> to publish your customer list if you so choose.

Aaron,

Would you like to reconsider that statement? However technically
accurate, its a blatent falsehood which insults the intelligence of
your peers on this group. I presume I don't have to explain why.

> It takes nothing away you currently have.

It takes my ability to assess whether you too are playing the game
honestly. If Reagan was right when he said, "trust but verify," it
takes my ability to trust you. And fails to replace it with the kind
of adversarial system that's required in an untrusted environment.

At a more practical level, it also makes it a good bit harder for the
RBLs like Spamhaus to track spammers since they won't have access to
identifying information with which to correlate prior activities from
elsewhere with the current ones.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



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William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
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