[anti-abuse-wg] New Abuse Information on RIPE NCC Website

In message <F8778529-E48C-4037-88E4-F70AE3B6E32A at ripe.net>, 
Suzanne Taylor Muzzin <staylormuz at ripe.net> wrote:

>We're happy to announce that we have created a dedicated page about
>network abuse...

What is that, exactly?  I mean "network abuse".

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

As should be obvious to anyone who has been here for awhile, or anyone
who knows me, my question is at least somewhat retorical.  I would like
an answer, but am not expecting any to be forthcoming, certainly not from
RIPE NCC (as opposed to RIPE itself), and certainly not in any sense
either formal or binding upon anyone or any thing.

I have previously stated my own extreme displeasure and concern about
this entirely unsatisfactory state of affairs, in which no person or
entity within the RIPE region or community is willing to offer up any
specific definition of the term "network abuse", and my own meager
attempts to instigate some process that would simply codify and formalize
this key term of debate and policy have met with no success whatsoever,
as everyone who has been on this list in recent months already knows.
Regardless, I feel compelled by both history and my own innate sense of
justice and fairness to try yet again to make my case.  (And yes, despite
any contentions to the contrary, the current lack of a formal definition
of "network abuse" _is_ resulting in unfairness and injustice, even if
that unfairness and injustice has not yet come for for any of the members
of RIPE who still maintain the indefensible position that no proper
definition of "network abuse" is either necessary or useful.)

I will be the first to admit that we here in the United States of America
have made a lot of mistakes, have gotten a lot of things wrong, and have
often behaved badly in, among and towards others in the community of nations.
One of the things that our founding fathers did not get wrong however was
their commitment to forming a more perfect union based upon the rule of
law, as opposed to the rule of men.  The latter had historically, consistantly
and inevitably degenerated into abject and unfettered tyranny.  Our forefathers
worked and fought to free both themselves and their posterity from exactly
that injustice, forever.  This was an unambiguous and self-evidently laudable
goal.

Now the Internet itself in engaged in a great civil war, testing whether
any distributed any decentralized amalgam and association of communicating
but otherwise independent networks, each answerable to no law but their own,
can long endure.  At present, almost daily reports of various highly de-
structive Distributed Denial of Service attacks flood the news, spammers
run free and largely unchecked by anyone or anything, skript kiddies can
and do invest mere minutes, and by so doing can and do cost reputable firms
and individuals countless hours and euros in defense and cleanup costs,
and both companies and nation states have now, by all accounts, formalized
their own ongoing policies of either mass intellectual property theft or
Denial of Service attacks, or both, against perceived commercial competitors
or perceived national enemies.  Whereas the costs and implications of all
these issues and problems are everwhere clear and apparent, organizations
such as RIPE continue to maintain in public a studied and all-encompassing
position of utter ignorance regarding the very nature of these problems,
even as mainstream journalists with far more compelling claims to techno-
logical ignorance report, often clearly and correctly, on these events
essentally every day now.  If RIPE still does not know what "network abuse"
is, then it is virtually alone in the industralized portions of the modern
world in its abject ignorance of the nature of these problems.

RIPE's current and ongoing policy of refraining from any attempts to codify
any formal or even any working definition of the term "network abuse" is
not a shining example of leadership.  Rather, it is an abdication.  Worse,
it amounts in practice to a tacit endorsement of the current defacto
"anything goes" environment and ethos which has, which does now, and which
will continue to be so costly to so many of RIPEs own members.  This
turing of a blind eye is defensible only in the minds of those members
who harbor a misplaced fear of one day finding themselves and their own
actions on the wrong side of some formalized definition of "network
abuse", and then being subjected to some form of community sanction on
that basis.  What I believe those members do not realize is that they
run a greater risk of being _unjustly_ sanctioned on othe basis of a
fluid, ill-defined, and constantly changing community conception of what
is and isn't "network abuse" than they would if the definition of this
term were codified, clear, public, and unchangable other than by community
vote.

For all of the above reasons I again implore the RIPE community as a whole,
and specifically the ambiguously named Anti-Abuse Working Group to begin
work immediately to develop and codify a consensus-driven formal definition
of the term "network abuse".  Any failure to do so will, in time, be under-
stood by all to have been an error of historic proportions.

This is a choice that the membership must make and _is_ making, including
even those members who naively believe that the community is deferring and
demurring from any choice.  Not to decide is to decide.  A choice not to
decide, in this instance, is tantamount to nothing less than a choice of
the rule of men over the rule of law.

Regards,
rfg