[arin-ppml] Petition Underway - Policy Proposal 95

[Chris Engel]

Bill Herrin wrote:

"Chris,

Whatever happened to the concept of administrative and technical contacts where the administrative contact was capable of dealing with administrative issues associated with the entity and the technical contact was capable of dealing with technical issues associated with the entity's network?

I have issues with Joe of the bot-infestation that his ISP is probably better geared to chase down but I also have issues with Joe the /14-holding florist that I want to discuss with Joe directly."


Bill,

That's great...but I'm not sure how exactly having Joe's contact info really helps you determine whether his /14 is justified?

As a member of the general public... you can't FORCE Joe to speak with you, right?

As a member of the general public... you can't FORCE Joe to answer questions about how he is using that address space...or even reasonably expect him to answer if his use involves confidential business practices... after-all how does Joe know your not helping a competitor fish for information on his business plans? He may even be under a confidentiality agreement himself which governs who/under what purposes he can reveal information about his services.

As a member of the general public.... if Joe is a private corporation, you don't even know how large his business is or how many computer/network assets he actually has or even what he utilizes them for.

As a member of the general public.... if Joe decides to feed you a fish story...your means of vetting  it are really quite limited...unless he's totally inept at scamming.

As a member of the general public.... You can't actually take any IP's Joe has away from him, can you? That would be ARIN's job.


As a matter of practicality, about the only real use I can see you for having Joe's contact info in THAT regards is if Joe's ISP assigned him a vastly larger network space then was justified..... and Joe really didn't know anything about it. Even then, it's not like the ISP can actually do anything with that space as long as it's assigned to Joe....and it would mean that Arin's staff was pretty darn asleep at the wheel.... if you as a member of the general public can catch something like that with only cursorary investigative abilities. Furthermore, even the rationale for an ISP wanting to hoard IP's pretty much goes away under IPv6 doesn't it?

In other words, I can see a legitimate case usage for wanting the info under such a scenario...but in terms of practicality it strikes me as even far more limited then the counter-case of mapping a competitors customer list or other privacy concerns.

I'm not adverse to having customer contact info published under the Administrative section but I DO think it aught to be the customers prerogative to determine if they are listed there or not.... at least as long as it's a public DB that allows anonymous look-ups. If you have to give up your own info to get info on somebody else...I could maybe see the case being otherwise. I could also see maybe exceptions for really large assignments... but practically what use is it to have a listing for every single /28 or /29 that's out there. Are you really going to check out each one as a member of the general public?

Honestly, I don't see the listing or not listing as that critical of an issue....but in the absence of a compelling use case for information needing to be public..... I prefer erring on the side of privacy. Just my preferences as a member of the general internet using community. I don't think the world will end or anything like that if the info is public...but if I'm given a preference...privacy is where my priority would fall.


Christopher Engel