[arin-ppml] Petition Underway - Policy Proposal 95:CustomerConfidentiality - Time Sensitive

[George Bonser]

> 
> Show me an alternative whose structure has a history of success in
> other applications. I've no love for SWIP. It was a pain in the rump
> back when I was responsible for the operations of an ISP. You might
> recall that my proposal 103 would have eliminated it in IPv6. But to
> accomplish that I had to change the address allocation criteria to
> something invulnerable to fraud.
> 
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin

An alternative is a layer of abstraction where the information you are
given depends on who you are and what you are looking for.  ARIN would
have all of the detailed information but there is no reason that one
should be able to easily trawl whois for a providers block and collect
all their SWIPs.  I just haven't figured out how such a thing would be
implemented yet.

SWIP information is VERY useful to me on a regular basis.  When I am
white listing a partner's space, I can easily find their network
assignments or at least know how big a block they have surrounding the
specific IPs they have given me.  I don't allocate space but discovering
a partner's allocated space is useful to me.  By "partner" I mean
someone who we are providing services for ... a customer.

What I need to do is enter that organization's handle and get back their
network assignments.  I don't need to work through their upstream's
address space to figure out who all their SWIPS are.

I also often need to know who the contact is for a specific IP.  We
might have a problem with someone's POP3 or IMAP server.  That is a
common issue where by default they allow only some small number of
concurrent connections.  But maybe our connections on behalf of their
users exceed that so I need to contact them to increase the number of
connections we are allowed.  Stuff like that happens fairly frequently
and getting their transit provider's contact info is going to make my
life more difficult because there isn't a darned thing the transit
provider is going to be able to do for me except give me the information
I should have already had.

So as a normal day to day requirement, I use the SWIP information to
gauge customer network assignments for traffic policy (at least as a
starting point) and for contact information to get problems fixed.

This proposal would make that more difficult.

What needs to be figured out is a way to give specific information to
specific requests but to deny casual perusal of the database yet in a
way that lends itself to automation and does not cause undue additional
work on the part of ARIN.