[address-policy-wg] 2023-04 Who do I speak for?

Hi Randy

Right on queue with another typical comment.

On Tue, 17 Oct 2023 at 01:08, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:
>
> > We simply cannot get many people to talk about many of the RIPE
> > Database issues.
>
> perhaps wg members are deterred by the walls of text with strong
> directives and opinions from a dominating co-chair (who lost the
> election but somehow is still here)?

It took walls of text to make people realise that an apparent simple
policy proposal to do nothing but introduce a new status value,
actually ripped the heart out of address policy and fundamentally
changed it. Whether that is a good or bad idea is not the point. If
that is what you want to do then be open about it and discuss it,
don't hide it. Which makes me wonder about some of those who just said
+1.

At least I have opinions and as Gert said the last time we discussed
this, you are all free to disagree with me and put forward your own
ideas.

>
> nothing the db wg does is worth the effort and pain, so we just go
> have coffee and get back to work.

You would prefer the DB-WG does nothing? Look back through the archive
since the last RIPE Meeting. There has only been one significant
discussion and that was actually about routing policy rather than the
database. I have deliberately said very little in this period. So if
you take out comments from chairs and announcements from the NCC not a
lot happened. None of the open issues have gone anywhere.

Let's have a serious reality check here. It is not ME who has an
agenda or dominates internet policy. It is a small group of the same,
very vocal people who dominate all policy discussion. As it says in
the RIPE NCC survey report:

[Despite high satisfaction with the mailing lists, there are some who
say they are “super old-fashioned and confusing” and have the “same
people commenting all the time”.]

It is the agenda of these 'same people' that dominates internet
policy. These recurring attacks on my style and detailed analysis are
a good diversion tactic to stop people listening to my messages and
thinking about the issues I raise. Classic smoke screen approach. Do
you actually have an opinion Randy on the 25 year old design of the
RIPE Database built around a 25-30 year old data model that is
becoming increasingly difficult to change and needed a 1 day course to
teach people the basics of using it? Or what about the many commercial
investors across this region who received IPv4 allocations from the
RIPE NCC and bought some on the open market, not having a clue about
internet operations, but know how to make a profit? Or the commercial
RIRs sitting below the RIPE NCC who manage all this commercial address
space using a distribution structure that simply cannot be represented
in the current database data model? Or the hundreds of /29 IPv6 blocks
held by these investors that were pretty much unused last time I
checked? These are all issues I have mentioned this year but no one
will talk about any of them. All you want to talk about is the length
of my emails and my style of writing. That gets you out of discussing
the slightly more serious issues in my emails.

I sometimes wonder why I bother. (There, I have given you the one
sentence you can latch on to, comment on sarcastically and ignore the
above paragraph.)

cheers
denis

(btw don't anyone ask me to name any of these investors or commercial
RIRs or mention the address blocks. That is not my job. Do your own
analysis.)

>
> randy