[anti-abuse-wg] Interaction between the RIPE and anti-abuse communities, was Draft Anti-Abuse WG Minutes ? RIPE 61

Suresh,

On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 19:20 +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> All the same, I would strongly repeat my request that the RIPE NCC as
> well as this WG work closely with anti abuse organizations including
> spamhaus (and of course MAAWG) to mitigate these problems.  There's a
> maawg later this year (october 24-27) in Paris where I am sure a
> discussion of how to work together with the abuse teams at SPs to help
> mitigate the problem of scarce v4 resources being allocated to
> malicious actors (and perhaps a focus on what V6 netblocks are being
> acquired by them, and what to do about those).

My own take on the interaction between the anti-abuse communities and
the rest of the networking community in general goes something like
this:

It is in the best interests of ISPs and other network operators to keep
network abuse to a minimum. However, they also have other priorities
other than simply handling abuse - hopefully these priorities align very
closely with their users.

The anti-spam community is by necessity narrowly focused on a small
subset of issues. For them, all of the other things that ISPs bring up
when talking about dealing with abuse seem like hand-waving, avoiding
responsibility, and otherwise trying to avoid doing the Right Thing.

I encourage ANYONE with interest in the Internet to participate in the
RIPE community and also to attend RIPE meetings, I do not think that
this will actually resolve the problems of tensions between communities.
The people involved want different things. (Plus it's hard to normalize
relations when Spamhaus representatives basically accuse the entire RIPE
community of being irresponsible.)

One possible source of additional upset is that people confuse the RIPE
NCC and RIPE. They go to the RIPE NCC, and the RIPE NCC says "we do not
make policy", and they think that they are just saying "nothing to be
done, sorry!" 

There *is* something to be done - engage the RIPE community. This is
where policies are made. Ultimately this means putting specific policy
proposals forward to the working groups, but it is probably best to
start by chatting with people about ideas on list or off. Stating a
problem often gets better results than proposing a solution.

--
Shane