[anti-abuse-wg] whois access

 >Because the policies to distribute and manage the number resources 
provided by IANA to the RIRs are a regional matter.

Yes, I would agree some things are a regional matter and should be 
handled regionally, in fact as much as possible.  However, access to the 
whois abuse data should not be.  The reason is that the purpose of this 
is to contact the administrator of ip blocks to notify them of issues.  
If someone is tracing an IP and they can get the data for some IP's and 
not others then I see a lack of standardization as a problem.

I think the whole issue comes down to this.  It is not possible to 
control how public information is used.  people don't want to accept 
that fact that it can't be done so they come up with schemes to make it 
look like they are doing something, like IP address blocking.  Then they 
get so focused on pursuing their IP address blocking policy that they 
lose sight of the fact that IP address blocking does essentially nothing 
to control the spam that is the core issue.  There is a big mantra to 
stop "harvesting" when, in actuality, there is nothing illegal about 
harvesting publicly available information or Google would have been shut 
down long ago.  Since there is no real basis for blocking access to 
public information this new argument has arisen where information is now 
mandated to be public yet is also protected and sensitive under privacy 
laws.  None of this makes the slightest amount of sense to me.  I do not 
believe blocking my network-tools.com is not going to affect the amount 
of spam sent to RIPE database contacts.  This is the real issue here.

My whois contacts for domains is in the Tucows whois.  This is protected 
by IP address blocks, CAPCHA, etc. yet I get spam all the time, these 
measures do no good.  I just change my address every few months.

Maybe the RIR's should set up system like whois privacy where the 
published addresses are all under RIPE.net domain and forwarded to 
hidden addresses.  The public RIPE.net e-mail addresses could also 
change periodically.  That way you have no privacy issue and the 
addresses "time out" so harvesting for future use is useless.

thank you.