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

My apologies to everyone.  I had intended to respond to the last few
messages in this thread several days ago, but I've been preoccupied
with other matters until now.

I want to respond only very briefly to one thing that Brian said, and
then I want to put forward three very simple proposals.  I know that I
have already been far too verbose, so I shall try now to be brief.


In message <51C437AF.1080300 at heanet.ie>, 
Brian Nisbet <brian.nisbet at heanet.ie> wrote:

>>> Of course in amongst all of this I would suspect if the resources were
>>> handed out, there would be a lot of depeering and null routing going on
>>> in relation to the poor, forced-to-spam, citizens of the Grand Duchy. :)
>>
>> Once again, based upon the available evidence, I would claim that it
>> would in fact be improbable that any substantial amount of deppeering
>> and/or null routing would occur, in practice.  It is a classic "trajedy
>> of the commons" problem, and no operator would wish to have to explain
>> to its user base why they, end end lusers, can no longer send e-mail to
>> their cousins in Grand Fenwick.
>
>I'm not sure, Spamhaus were quite happy to block Latvia for a far 
>smaller reason. I think if it was a mandated activity for all citizens 
>the reaction of the international community might be interesting.

For once I am at a loss for words.

Let me just say that I really feel that it would be... and perhaps even
is currently... utterly wrong for the Internet and all actual and at
least somewhat transparent and/or democratic authorities thereof, to
completely defer, for the ongoing maintenance of order and sanity on
the Internet, to Spamhaus.  To say that that organization is imperfect
would be an understatement.  They miss much.  And more to the point,
Spamhaus is, in my estimation anyway, about as non-transparent in their
policies, their operations, and their records as it is possible to be.
Furthermore, deferring to them entirely for the enforcement of accepted
norms is, and would be, in my opinion, just another kind of abdication.
I believe that we can do better.

To that end, I have three small proposals:

1)  That the charter of the RIPE Anti-Abuse working group be ammended
    so as to make abundantly clear that whenever any two or more members
    of the WG bring to the attention of the chair that there may exist
    some specific allocation of number resources which either is no longer
    valid, or which may never have been actually valid to begin with,
    (based upon currently accepted criteria for number resource allocation
    within the RIPE region) then the WG chair will be obliged to undertake
    a preliminary informal inquiry, including public discussion on the
    mailing list, as and when that may be useful, and that following this
    initial informal inquiry, if, in the opinion of that chair, there
    exists some reasonable basis for believing that the number resource
    allocation(s) in question may indeed no longer be valid, then the
    chair is further obligated to formally report this fact to RIPE NCC,
    along with a formal request from the WG to RIPE NCC, that RIPE NCC
    immediately undertake a usual and customary audit of the allocation(s)
    in question, and the justification thereof.

2)  That the charter of RIPE itself be ammended to stipulate, explicitly,
    that in any case in which the Anti-Abuse Working Group chair has made
    a formal request, to RIPE NCC, on behalf of the WG, for an audit to
    determine whether or not a given number resource allocation is or is
    not currently valid, that RIPE NCC is obliged by such a request to
    actually conduct the requested audit, and to do so in a timely fashion.

3)  That the precise cirteria used by RIPE NCC to justify each possible
    different kind of number resource allocation, either initially or
    during any post-allocation audit, be made public in its entirety if
    it is not so already.

I make the above three proposals with an understanding that what is
politically possible at the present time with respect to most forms of
what I suspect we would all agree constitutes "network abuse" is at best
minimal.  There is clearly little appetite to turn either this WG or
RIPE NCC into a functioning police force in any sense, and certainly
not with respect to matters that are not even universally accepted as
"abuse".

Nonetheless, there does exist a massive problem with so-called "snowshoe"
spammers getting ahold of really big chunks of IPv4 address space... which
they then waste in a truly massive and almost obscene way... and also
there is a problem with crooks who either want to lay their hands on vast
tracks of IPv4 address space for so-called "black-hat SEO" purposes, or
who have already done so.  As I understand it, RIPE allocation policies
_already_ place most or all of this activity outside of the established
RIPE rules and framework for allocations.  So to combat at least these
few limited forms of "network abuse" it now seems that all we need is
an accepted process by which the pre-existing process known as a "RIPE
NCC audit" can be triggered, in deserving cases, many of which are already
known to, or are likely in future to come to the attention of members of
this working group and participants on this mailing list.


Regards,
rfg