[anti-abuse-wg] Abuse-C attributes - required e-mail address contact method.

My two cents...

The person/company who proposed this proposal used the word "complainant"
to refer to someone (anyone) attempting to report a case of network
abuse to its source network administrators.

Personally, speaking only for myself, I object to being called a
"complainant" or a "complainer", e.g. when I attempt to do the decent
thing and take up _my_ valuable time to notify responsible (?) network
administrators about something I feel that they themselves may want
to know about, and indeed should want to know about.

Of course, the Powers That Be at many networks ... the bean counters
and the higher level managers... often view _any_ communication with
any party other than a paying customer as a waste of time and money,
and thus, the personel underneath these folks inevitably come to
develop an "us versus them" attitude which leads inevitably to viewing
reports generated by outsiders, aka non-paying customers, as "complaints"
and the senders as "complainers" whose only (or primary) goal is to
cost the receiving company time and money, rather than the opposite,
i.e. attempting to _help_ the receiving company.

I would argue that it is this bean counter attitute that has itself
given rise to most of the abuse on the Internet, i.e. in the time since
the broad commercialization of the net in the mid 1990's.

If you view receiving, understanding, and acting upon notifications
of bad behavior occuring on your network as nothing other than a
non-profit-generating cost sink, then you are entirely less likely to
ever actually *do* anything about such reports.  And when you don't,
the word goes out among the bad guy communities on the Internet, and
your network ends up being the source of ever more network abuse.
This is just the (Darwinian) way things are.  Opportunistic leeches
abound.  If given safe homes, they and their activities proliferate.

I generally expend a good deal of time and effort writing up any abuse
report I send.  (Note that I say "report" not "complaint".) There are
plenty of ways that various networks have dreamed up to avoid reading
these "complaints", i.e. because they don't immediately or obviously
generate any instantaneous revenue or profits for the receipient networks.
The simplest method to avoid spending any non-profit-generating company
man hours on reading abuse reports is just to alias abuse at network to
/dev/null.  If Virgin feels that reading incoming e-mail reports is not
worth their time, then I respectfully suggest that they simply enter
devnull at example.com into the abuse contact e-mail address fields for
all of their relevant RIPE database records.  This will be maximally
efficient for all concerned.  (There really is no more efficient way
for Virgin to process all of their incoming "complaints".  And since they
_are_ clearly concerned about the efficiency of this process, that would
seem to be ttheir best solution.)


Regards,
rfg