[address-policy-wg] Clarification of policy requirements for contact information

Thanks for the feedback so far Peter, Jan and Michiel. All noted. 

>From my experience of operating multiple medium to very-large orgs\LIRs with many admins and teams of varying roles and responsibilities for RIPE DB maintenance, keeping contact data up-to-date for the different types users/holders of so many IP networks held by us and customers is extremely challenging. Something that I believe is felt by many orgs\LIRs, hence the despairing comments about Whois' condition today at RIPE77 during the Services WG and the ever growing amount of outdated or useless data. 

IMHO there are just too many open objects and attributes where contact data can be registered that can easily become isolated and extremely difficult to maintain. Not only an admin pain, IP resources become vulnerable to unintentional or nefarious misuse and even deregistration by the NCC! If we can somehow reduce the maintenance burden, it would be a significant step towards a more accurate, reliable, useful IP database. 

Regards, 
James 

-----Original Message-----
From: address-policy-wg [mailto:address-policy-wg-bounces at ripe.net] On Behalf Of Peter Hessler
Sent: 09 April 2019 11:36
To: address-policy-wg at ripe.net
Subject: Re: [address-policy-wg] Clarification of policy requirements for contact information

On 2019 Apr 09 (Tue) at 11:28:19 +0200 (+0200), Jan Ingvoldstad wrote:
:On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 11:16 AM Peter Hessler <phessler at theapt.org> wrote:
:
:>
:> Concrete suggestion:
:> I think that person objects should have the address and phone attributes :> be changed from mandatory to optional.
:>
:
:And that means optional as in opt-in, not opt-out.
:

Correct.


:> It may also be worthwhile for there to be a *private* way to register :> addresses with RIPE NCC so they can use it for verification without :> violating the privacy of natural persons.
:>
:
:Yup.
:
:Additionally, in the cases where all contact objects are personal with :contact information hidden, there needs to be an abuse object that can be :used. The quality of actually usable abuse contact information is :regrettably low across RIR databases, contact information quality is not a :RIPE specific problem.
:

I strongly disagree, but that is another topic.

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