[address-policy-wg] 2012-05 New Draft Document and Impact Analysis Published (Transparency in Address Block Transfers)

* Sander Steffann

> Looking at the feedback I see two types of responses:
> - The policy proposal is good as it is
> - Information on rejected transfer should be anonymised
> 
> We could suggest to the proposer to add the 'anonymise rejected transfers' bit to the proposal, but we are not sure if that would gain support on one side while losing support from people who like the policy proposal as it currently is...
> 
> So... Again your feedback please! Is there anyone who thinks that anonymising details of rejected transfers is a bad idea? (and if so: please explain why)

I object to publishing information of rejected transfers (and, by
extension, rejected pre-approvals). The NCC does not publish any
information about rejected PA allocation requests either, and I don't
see why transfers should be any different.

If this requirement was removed, I would have no objections to the
policy. That said, I am not quite sure it is really necessary, as all
the requested information (except rejections) is already available: All
allocations are listed in alloclist.txt along with their date and
holding LIR (reg-id and name). It will be trivial to check for transfers
- allocations made after the last /8 policy comes into effect outside of
185/8 must be transfers. (In addition, the allocation and date are also
available in delegated-ripencc-extended-latest, and the details of the
holding LIR is also available in the RIPE database.)

The only information I know of that isn't easily accessible is which LIR
originally held the transferred resource, since historic copies of
alloclist.txt isn't available on the FTP. You would have had to build up
your own archive by mirroring the file daily. I do expect that people
who are interested in monitoring transfers would do just that, instead
of waiting for the monthly digest called for by this proposal.

I think that a simpler and probably much faster way (no PDP!) to
accomplish the desired «transparency in address block transfers» would
be to simply ask the NCC to publish historic versions of alloclist.txt,
and/or to include a regid/LIR column for resources in
delegated-ripencc-extended-latest (for which historic archives are
available). This has been recently suggested in the services wg, but it
was objected to, because of privacy issues for assignment holders (so
irrelevant relevant to this proposal). I think I'll go and revive that
thread now...

Oh, and by the way: why specify exactly monthly? As noted above, the NCC
has no problems publishing most of this information on a daily basis. If
they are able to automatically publish the transfer list daily too, why
not let them?

-- 
Tore Anderson
Redpill Linpro AS - http://www.redpill-linpro.com