[arin-ppml] private whois record

William Herrin bill at herrin.us
Tue Aug 7 14:41:54 EDT 2012


On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Chris Engel <cengel at conxeo.com> wrote:
> The reason is that Engineers tend to be a much
> more valuable/expensive resource then CSR/Answering
> Service personnel. You don't want to waste that resource
> with the initial screening of calls that might include a very
> high noise to signal ratio.

Respectfully, that's a specious argument. My contact information has
been published multiple places in the whois system for going on 20
years. Very little that shouldn't reach me gets through the spam
filter and I can count on one hand the number of times I've been
called based on the whois information by someone who had no business
calling.

Then too, timeliness is a factor. Whether it's "you're attacking my
network, please stop" or "You stole my photo; I'm hopping mad and
ready to sue," it's important that an intermediary not exacerbate the
situation with delay, confusion and general non-responsiveness.


On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Chu, Yi [NTK] <Yi.Chu at sprint.com> wrote:
> APNIC has a 'private' option for LIR to make the non-portable assignments
> private.  It fulfills the LIR's registration requirements, and at the same
> time gives LIR option to address its customer's privacy concerns.  It does
> seem a superb idea.

It's a superb idea if you're a LIR. If you're any other consumer of
the data it sucks.


On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Chu, Yi [NTK] <Yi.Chu at sprint.com> wrote:
>  I would like to know first if ARIN has a similar feature
> to accommodate my customer's request.

No. Identifying information is required of corporate consumers of a
/29 or more, including street address, telephone number and email
address.

That having been said, it is possible for the customer to establish a
legal entity to hold his network resources and then report that
entitiy's identity. The expense is not trivial but if the security
concern is bona fide, it's not excessive either. It will shield the
end user's identity from casual inspection.


>  If not, has the topic been discussed and if there is interest in pursuing.

It has been discussed. Every couple of years since the .com and .net
registries started allowing it.

The short version is that culturally speaking, folks in North America
place a much higher stock in process transparency than folks in Asia
tend to. Corrupt practices have trouble standing the light. We are
suspicious approaching paranoid about public secrets and try to allow
them only when it would be exceedingly destructive not to. When it's
appropriate that information be reported at all then, everything else
being equal, it's also appropriate for that report to be public. Trial
records. Real estate taxes. Presidential birth certificates. And the
identities of address holders.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004



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