[arin-ppml] Petition Underway - Policy Proposal 95

[Chris Engel]

Bill Herrin wrote:

"There are, of course, other values to an administrative contact. You are, for example, not a common carrier. If your customer is hiding behind your identity as an ISP, you could end up responsible for accepting legal notice on his behalf. Is your legal department staffed adequately to avoid missteps in that process that will get you sued by the complainant, your customer or both?"


Bill,

That is a great arguement for an ISP WANTING to tell a customer "You must make your admin contact available for public listing as part of the Terms of our service agreement".  However why is it ARIN's mission to mandate via policy that decision for BOTH the ISP and the Client. Shouldn't the decision be left in the hands of the parties actualy affected by that decision. I mean if the ISP WANTs to accept responsability for things like relaying Take Down Notices and the client WANT's them to do it...who is ARIN to dictate to them that they can't have that arrangement?

By that same token, if I'm something like an ASP (we actually happen to fall into that category) and as part of our application, we provide our customers the ability to send out e-mail from the application.... and some-one finds something ACTIONABLE in one of our clients use of that function (sending e-mail). Then, if the plaintiff has no other way of tracing the origin of that e-mail other then IP...we, as the ASP WILL be getting the initial Legal Notice related to that use anyway...and be responsible for the legal issues in handling/responding/forwarding that NOTICE. Does that mean that ARIN's policy should REQUIRE that we publish in a public database for anonymous lookup every single customer who uses our application and presumably also publish in that same DB the info to track each use of the application to them? If NOT, then why should it insist that an ISP must essentialy do the same thing?

As I see it, only 2 things really fall under ARIN's mandate.... 1) Making sure that the use of public address space is fair and equitable.  2) Making sure that every public IP address can be tracked to some ENTITY responsible for answering for it's use. In the case you brought up it would be.... The ISP is the answerable party.... it may be acting as an Agent for the actual end user...but how is that any different from an ASP....or even one of those companies that rents office space/services acting as an Agent for an actual end user of it's services?

Again, if both the Service Provider and the Client are willing to have the Service Provider act as an agent for the client.... why should policy dictate that they can't?

Heck, if some-one wants to list in WHOIS the admin contact info for thier lawyers office....and thier lawyer is willing to do it...why should ARIN dictate that they can't?




Christopher Engel