[anti-abuse-wg] 2019-04 Discussion Phase (Validation of "abuse-mailbox")

Petrit Hasani wrote on 28/04/2020 15:01:
> A new version of RIPE policy proposal, 2019-04, "Validation of
> "abuse-mailbox"", is now available for discussion.

The updated version of this policy proposal is here:

> https://www.ripe.net/participate/policies/proposals/2019-04/draft

The proposal has the following problems, each of which would be 
sufficient reason it its own right to reject the proposal:

> and must not force the sender to use a form.

It's not the job of the RIPE NCC to tell its members how to handle abuse 
reports, and it is beyond inappropriate for this working group to expect 
the RIPE NCC to withdraw numbering resources if member organisations 
don't comply with an arbitrary policy which forces the use of SMTP email 
like this.

> [...] is present and can receive messages at least every six months*.
> If the validation fails, the RIPE NCC
and:

> *The RIPE NCC may change the validation period depending on the level
> of accuracy of the contacts. For example, switching from six-month to
> one-year period once contact accuracy has improved.

This addition proposes to micromanage the RIPE NCC even further. 
Arbitrary time-scales like this are operational details which have no 
place in a well-thought-out policy.

> This validation process will not check how the abuse cases are
> processed. The community should escalate/report back to the RIPE NCC,
> so anonymised statistics can be collected and periodically
> published.

> However, the community should report any situation to the RIPE NCC,
> which can provide (anonymous) periodical statistics to the community,
> which can take further decisions about that.

This proposes that the RIPE NCC becomes an abuse reporting clearinghouse 
based on unsubstantiated community gossip.  This is inappropriate in 
many different ways.

> It should be clear that the policy intent is not to look into how the
> abuse mailbox is monitored or how abuse cases are handled.

It's difficult to take this seriously when the intent of most of the 
rest of the text in the proposal is about using the RIPE NCC to monitor 
how abuse cases are handled and to ensure that the abuse mailbox is 
monitored.

The proposal is self-contradictory, intrusive into NCC membership 
business processes and there is no compelling reason to believe that the 
proposal will end up reducing the amount of abuse on the internet.

In addition, all of these problems were identified in previous versions 
of the proposal, i.e. none of them has been resolved and because of 
that, there is no reason to think that this version is any more likely 
to reach consensus than any of the previous versions.

The proposal needs to be abandoned.

Nick