[anti-abuse-wg] 2019-03 New Policy Proposal (BGP Hijacking is a RIPE Policy Violation)

In message <20190322100522.GC99066 at cilantro.c4inet.net>, 
"Sascha Luck [ml]" <aawg at c4inet.net> wrote:

>I am no longer convinced that political regulation is undesirable.

Oh!   Well, I think that *I* could remedy THAT!

I'll just give two examples of government regulation, pertaining to
the Internet, which have had demonstratably AWFUL results.

The first is the federal CAN-SPAM Act in the United States, which
effectively legalized spamming under certain (and very minimalist and
easily circumvented) conditions.  (That federal law, not coincidentally,
also effectively nullified the much better and stronger California
state law, which actually did outlaw spamming, just as it was about
to go into effect.)

I'm not going to go into either the history of, or the abundant failures
of the Federal law in question, which has been quite rigtly dubbed
the "YOU CAN SPAM Act" by its many detractors, including me.  My
belief is that many/most of the folks here are already familiar with
this heavily-lobbied-for travesty, and its disasterous consequences.
I refer everyone else the abundant relevant literature which is
readily available online.

My second example is more recent and comes from your side of the
pond.  I am of course speaking of GDPR and the unambiguously
disasterous effect it has had with respect to domain name WHOIS
records, EVEN THOSE that are quite unambiguously outside of the
intended scope of GDPR, i.e. those for domains that were registered
by legal entities other than natural persons.

Quite predictably, numerous major registrars have used the european
adoption of GDPR as a conveient excuse/pretext to completely wipe
out WHOIS as we knew it, thus severely hobbling the work of both
law enforcement and independent anti-abuse researchers.  This is a
perfect example the cure being worse than the disease, when the rule-
making is left to the wisdom... or lack thereof... of luddite government
bureaucrats who are merely trying to curry some short-term political
favor from an ill-informed and unduly terrified populace.

To anyone who believes that they can either cite, or even find -any-
example of governmental regulation of the Internet that could not
have been handled better if it had been left in the hands of actual
technologists to solve, then by all means, please do cite those examples.
In lieu of any such, I will continue to assert that we are all MUCH
better off if we can keep the idiot bureaucrats and legislators as
far away from the Internet as possible.


Regards,
rfg