[anti-abuse-wg] whois access

 > I'm sure ARIN had good reasons to act as they did, either favourably 
to your interests, or not, it simply doesn't matter in the RIPE Region.

Why would you be sure of that and why wouldn't it matter?  It seems to 
me that all internet users have a stake in seeing that the services are 
reliable in all regions.

 >Sorry, the bulk access/harvesting prevention mechanisms have been in 
place for a *very* long time. So, I guess the "suddenly" is more likely 
to be related to a change in your query pattern >and/or frequency, than 
to a change in the mechanisms.

No, something has changed.  They are claiming now there is some type of 
limit of 1000 queries per day.  They have not blocked me in the past and 
the queries exceed that so something changed recently.

 >Well - although this is formally outside the topic of discussion - 
looking at your style, approach and choice of words, I am not overly 
surprised...

So you are saying Internet policy should be based on an evaluation of a 
person's choice of style?  In other words if you are not part of a small 
clique then you don't matter?  Many system admins act like this and they 
think their anti-spam systems trumps every other need and they don't 
care how much damage is done.  There are many people like this involved 
in Internet governance and it is a big problem because they don't 
balance the needs of different parties.  these are the people that often 
ridicule anyone who brings up issues or ideas that goers against their 
view of the world from their limited experience.

 >PS: and even I ( :-) ), or rather the lab where I am doing teaching 
this stuff, get blocked when we activate the triggers, for one reason or 
another. And that's how it is meant to work :-)

Yes.  Then there is supposed to be a policy in place to make a 
determination of what is allowed and what is not.  the problem is that 
ARIN says it is allowed but RIPE says it is not.  It is apparentky 
common to all the commercial whois providers that they use a distributed 
system of IP's so I don't have any special knowledge or information.

 >I believe many other players, including US-based ones, quite 
successfully use RIPE database contents for purposes similar to yours.

I was doing fine for 13 years until recently.  Apparently the successful 
ones uses distributed IP's to avoid the blocking.

>The RIPE database is maintained by the RIPE NCC, and to the best of my
>knowledge, the RIPE-specific (non-mirrored) contents of the database have
>been contributed, update by update, by the RIPE NCC and the RIPE community.
>I totally fail to see how e.g. my person object would have been 'bought and
>paid for by the US taxpayer'.


I believe the data is under the ultimate control of the US Government 
based on the contract between the US and IANA.  Here is an EC news 
release about it:
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/11/1345&format=HTML&aged=0&language=en&guiLanguage=en

If someone has the contract between RIPE and IANA I would like to see 
that as well.

It is interesting that nobody can explain why RIPE has one policy and 
ARIN has a different one.  Also, nobody seems to agree that the services 
like whois need to be standardized across the Internet.  Most shockingly 
nobody wants to address the fact that the IP address blocking does not 
do what it is intended to do.  Most comments just assume RIPE must be 
right and that I must have done something wrong ... my stye is wrong and 
I present myself incorrectly, etc, etc.  This is what happens when 
someone outside the closed community tries to bring issues to the 
table.  The speaker is attacked and the issues are glossed over.  It is 
interesting because I am usually on the other side of the privacy 
argument and I have testified before the US Federal Trade Commission 
arguing for greater privacy protection.

thank you