[address-policy-wg] 2022-02 New Policy Proposal (Remove mandatory IPv4 PA assignment registration in the RIPE Database)

Hell all,

I'm thorned on this one.

While I fully understand RIPE NCC' willingness reduce the administrative 
burden on something that's supposed to be deprecated, we all know that 
the scarcity will introduce new challenges against fraudulent use of 
address space. If not with a fully documented assignments' database, we 
would loose a tool to mitigate abuse.

On the other hand, let's be realistic, only a very few of us document 
assignments in full, and in a way that's not actually bloating the database.

As far as I'm concerned, I see two scenarios :

- An ISP who wants to distinguish its infrastructure from its customers
- A more general provider delegating prefixes routed from other ASNs.

The second case is clearly closed : to get a route object, the INETNUM 
has to be specified.

On the former though, I know of some large ISPs moving customers behing 
CGNs using former infrastructure space and didn't declare it within the 
database. It's a nightmare when trying to enforce aggressive anti-spam 
policies.

Does it matter ? I think not.

I'd like to postpone this proposal until we get reports on clear cases 
and arguments to alleviate the administrative burden and cleanse the 
database, if any stands. The current policy being not uphold to the best 
standards doesn't seem to me as a meaningful reason to lighten what 
_should_ be our responsibility.

Best regards,

-- 
Jérôme Nicolle
+33 6 19 31 27 14