[arin-ppml] Regarding draft policy 2010-3

[James Hess]

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 11:05 PM, Kenneth Odem
<kenneth.odem at virpusnetworks.net> wrote:
> This is needed to avoid solicitations, which it has been shown that
> competitors can and do use information available to the public to solicit to
> said company's customers.
[snip]
I would say it's not a valid basis for ISPs to be allowed to hide
re-assignment information.  It only potentially serves self-interests
of some providers at huge expense to the community.  Also, if
competitors want to market services to a provider's customers, there
are more effective means to do that than  trying ad-hoc queries
against the WHOIS directory.

So hiding information from WHOIS actually does not accomplish or aid
the objective of "avoiding solicitations"  in any way that has been
quantified; it _might_, but I consider it to be very unlikely.

   The contacts listed in WHOIS are normally technical contacts, who
are likely to report such spam and abuse of the WHOIS service if they
receive such unwanted mail, and unlikely to respond favorably to
solicitation.

Almost every company today lists business contact information on their
web site, which is more likely to be directly responsive to a sales
pitch.


Soliciters are much more likely  to scan the ISP's   IP ranges,
perform RDNS lookups,  and harvest information from web servers.

They do not have to do this themselves,  there are services they can
buy all this information from.

Removal of  information from the WHOIS directory doesn't really stop them,
unless the downstream customer has neither a website nor a mail
server, nor any RDNS, in their re-assigned IP space.

--
-J