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

In message <20190323135406.GO99066 at cilantro.c4inet.net>, 
"Sascha Luck [ml]" <aawg at c4inet.net> wrote:

>Further, the danger exists that this community is not done yet.
>Once a mechanism to terminate unwelcome behaviour is established,
>it is relatively easy to plug in any other behaviour that this
>community, or elements thereof, would like to see removed from the
>internet. 

I understand this reasonable concern, but I think that in this instance
it is misplaced.

Quite certainly, there would be, and rightly should be, many hard questions
asked if the proposal on the table were to suspend RIPE memberships in
response to, say, failure to pay court-ordered child support, or smoking
in a crowded theater, or any of a million other things that some people
might deem worthy of punishment but that have nothing at all directly
to do with RIPE or its activities.  I would completely agree that even
the suggestion that RIPE should in any way involve itself in any such
clearly unrelated matters would be a bridge too far.

But that is not the nature of the proposal on the table.  The proposal
on the table has to do with Internet number resoures and ONLY Internet
number resources, their allocation, their use, and their misuse.

This, it seems to me, is a fairly tight ring-fence.  Sascha Luck is
concerned that in future there might be some outbreak of infectious
moral outrage... about this, that, or the other unrelated thing...
and that the present proposal sets a precedent that might in future
allow social do-gooders to deploy RIPE as a weapon in some largely
unrelated moral crusade.  This is not an entirely unreasonable concern,
and it would indeed be very bad if it happened.  But as long as we
confine ourselves to the ring-fence of *only* allowing RIPE to take
note of events with respect to Internet number resources, I don't
see there as being any real possibility that RIPE, in its official
capacity, will be energized or employed to address the epidemic of
violence in schools, or free needle exchange for addicts, or the
preservation of the Brazillian rain forrest.  Those are all entirely
valid social concerns, but I don't believe that it takes any deep
intellectual capacity to notice that, unlike the present proposal,
they have nothing specifically to do with Internet number resources.


Regards,
rfg