[anti-abuse-wg] 2019-03 and over-reach

In message <f1d02b78-49fa-0b62-d84c-578b30d1c4b7 at foobar.org>, 
Nick Hilliard <nick at foobar.org> wrote:

>There are several aspects of this proposal that are pretty disturbing, 
>but the two that jump out are 1. over-reach by the RIPE Community, 2. 
>encroachment into the arena of supranational law enforcement.

I seriously don't know how one could make such a large leap in logic.

"Law enforcement" has the power to put handcuffs on people, to deny
them liberty for extended periods of time, and in the case of both
individuals and companies, to substantially penalize them monitarily.
The proposal at hand neither suggests nor contemplates any such
actions or remedies, nor even anything that could be construed as
such, even in the most wild-eyed interpretation.

2019-03 is not an exercise in law enforcement, either supranational
or otherwise.  It is, rather, a simple refinement and extension of
current and existing private contractual relationships, where the
harshest possible outcome would be for the parties to agree to
disagree about what each owes to the other, under the terms of the
written contract(s), and then perhaps to go their separate ways,
having terminated their private contractual relationship.

If you trash a rental car, and return it trashed, and if the company
that rented the car to you thus makes the reasonable and utterly
defensible decision not to rent cars to you in the future, is that
an exercise in "law enforcement"?  I think not.

>Regarding over-reach, the RIPE NCC was instituted as a numbering 
>registry and as a supporting organisation for the RIPE Community, whose 
>terms of reference are described in the RIPE-1 document. The terms of 
>reference make it clear that the purpose of the RIPE Community and the 
>RIPE NCC is internet co-ordination and - pointedly - not enforcement.

I say again what I have previously said, which this that 2019-03, even
if accepted and ratified by the community, would not give RIPE any
more power to "enforce" its will over anyone's -routers- than RIPE would
have had the day before such ratification.  I therefore find this use
of the term "enforcement" in this context somewhat foreign and strange.

Given its mandate to facilitate and foster "coordination" in the use
of RIPE-assigned number resources, are you ernestly suggesting that
RIPE is constitutionally prohibited from even holding sway over its
own WHOIS data base and the entries therein, in accordance with the
clear guidance and wishes of the community?  Does RIPE not already
"enforce" the removal of some such WHOIS entries in response to the
non-payment of dues?  If it does, then please point me at the specific
provision or provisions of RIPE's charter that explicitly prohibit it
from doing likewise in other circumstances that also, arguably, represent
a clear and present threat to RIPE's ability to carry out its assigned
"coordination" duties... duties which, we both agree, it has been tasked
to persue and foster.

I, for one, find it both endlessly humorous and also endlessly sad
that RIPE has been given the -responsibility- for coordinating the
use of resources, even as it has been consistantly denied any and 
every tool that it might employ to assert its -authority- to do so.
2019-03 represents at least a small step towards righting that
colossal and damaging imbalance between RIPE's responsibility and
its near utter lack of actual authority.  (And I can only hope that
at least a few of the people reading these words will have, at some
point in their professional lives, likewise been stuck in a position
where they were given a mountain of responsibily and a pee-shooter's
worth of actual authority.   Those folks, at least, will have a clear
understanding of why this never works out very well.)

>Proposal 2019-03 goes well outside the scope of what the RIPE Community 
>and the RIPE NCC were constituted to do, and I do not believe that the 
>Anti Abuse working group has the authority to override this.

RIPE was chartered to "keep the books" as it were... to maintain the
giant ledger of who has been assigned what.  Why?  What was the purpose...
what *is* the purpose of maintaining one big colossal ledger of who
has been assigned what if everyone just thumbs their noses at it, and
if they all then go around, willy-nilly, ignoring the assigments that
have been so carefully recorded in that giant community ledger?

If the ledger itself is to have any meaning, then it must be adhered to.
If it is not adhered to, then let's just terminate it, once and for all,
and be done this whole charade that is called RIPE.  Let's go back to
the Internet stone age, to a time even before Jon Postel, and let's
just have an every-man-for-himself free-for-all.  It would be a lot
cheaper.  Everybody could stop paying RIPE membership dues and RIPE fees.

But I don't think that's what anybody really wants.

I cannot and will not argue whether this working group or that working
group, specifically, has the right or authority to choose whether RIPE
should be allowed to use the tools it has to do the job it has been
assigned.  That is for others to pass judgement on, not me.  I will only
say that this authority, the authority to notice and take action when
parties flaunt the entire assignment system, should be granted, and that
doing so would not be in any way inconsistant with any RIPE mandate or
with what RIPE was chartered to do from day one.  Quite the opposite.
It would be supoportive of RIPE's fundamental mission.

RIPE keeps a set of public books, and the very existance of those public
ledger books, it is hoped, will ensure peace, stability, order, and at
least some measure of mutual security.  The overriding goal is *not* the
books themselves, or their continued slavish maintenance, for their own
sakes, into the comming centuries.  These are not sacred texts being
copied and recopied by a cadre of devoted monks, for posterity, in some
candle-lit monastic sanctum.  These are the land deeds of the Internet.
And they have long since been accepted as such by virtually everyone.

What we have seen, time and again now, and what cannot now be reasonably
denied, is that every so often, one of the lanholders who is a registrant
in, and himself a direct beneficiary of this established system of public
order and security, has gathered unto himself a modest force of servants,
slaves, waifs, concubines, and mercenaries, and has then ridden out to
some nearby defenseless village, and has then laid siege to and ultimately
laid claim to lands that are not his.  So the question arises -- What
shall we do with such scoundrels?  Shall we welcome them to our tables,
break bread with them, share our wine, laugh at their jokes, slap them
on the back and congratulate them for their pluck, wit, courage and
boldness?  Or should we instead cast them out from among the company of
civilized men and from the system of order that they themselves, and by
their own hands, have so explicitly violated and to which they themselves
would no doubt appeal when and if some even bolder robber barron were to
come down upon them and their own holdings?

I can only answer for myself, but to me the choice is clear.  Those who
have, with malice aforethought, violated the system of rules that we,
as a community, have accepted should not subsequently be permitted to
call upon that same set of rules, or the community's ledgers, in defense
of their own interests.  To allow this would be unarguably both unjust
and self-defeating of the social contract to which each and all of us
have already suordinated ourselves and our individual private interests.

RIPE does not have and should not have the power to put anyone in irons.
But it damn well isn't obliged, I think, to act as either a reference for
or a guarantor of the legitimacy of the holdings of any party that, by its
own acts, has declined to likewise and in turn endorse RIPE and its ledger
and its assignments.


Regards,
rfg