Re: Commecial vs fairness (was: spam support)

["Allen Smith" <]

On Feb 14,  9:25am, variable@localhost wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Mally Mclane wrote:
> 
> > For RIPE to police ISPs on *their own* AUP, and investigate if they are
> > actually breaking *their own* AUP would be a huge task, and one I think
> > would be beyond the capabilities, man power wise, of RIPE at the moment.
> 
> That's why it would be simpler and more feasible to have a generic AUP
> that covers basic requirements such as responding to abuse/spam complaints
> within certain time, applying appropriate border filters, not knownly
> hosting kiddie porn, etc.

How do you define "kiddie porn"? While there's been one treaty
attempting to define it as "below 18", this has rather obvious
conflicts with that the age of consent in most European countries (as
with US states), IIRC, is typically below 18.

> I know that enforcing even a basic AUP is beyond RIPE's capabilities at
> the moment, but the extra resources can be found with a mixture of
> governmental sponsorship (as the internet is now an intrinsic part of any
> country's comms infrastructure)

Governmental sponsorship -> governmental
controls/censorship/etcetera. There are lots of governments - nice,
rich governments capable of paying RIPE a lot - in the Middle East,
for instance, that would like to ban anything conflicting with, say,
their fundamentalist view of Islam (as in Saudi Arabia), or simply
anything critiquing their government.

> and slightly increased LIR fees.  If RIPE
> has over 3000 LIRs on their books, then increasing the fee by 200 euros
> would give them over e600,000.  It shouldn't be difficult to get EU
> funding to match this.

RIPE != EU only.

> > It also opens up all manner of legal/operational issues, which I am sure
> > RIPE would rather not get involved in.

Wise of them. RIPE needs to limit itself to involvement in things that 
are basic to the network, such as making sure WHOIS information for
contacting responsible people (and, if necessary, taking further
action, ranging from using addresses to serve legal papers to simply
knowing what that irresponsible ISP's networks are so they can be
blacklisted). I'm sorry to say that some people - including one of the
heads of the ietf-whois list - want to ignore these usages, as I've
commented on here earlier. Eric Brunner-Williams wants to do away with 
publically available WHOIS information - or anything similar from
other sources - entirely, as far as I can tell. (As long as law
enforcement, large ISP admins, etcetera are allowed access to such
information, this will do real privacy no good whatsoever - indeed, it 
will lead people to believe that information on them is not present
when it is actually available.)

> I'm sure they wouldn't, but the problem is that times have changed.
> The days when you could rely on an AS admin/technical contact to
> care about the traffic that was originated from their network are
> gone.  There needs to be a central organisation that will act if the
> network provider will not.

There are alternatives, as long as enough information is available to
determine who is acting responsibly and who isn't. Some contacts still 
care; the others, including those who are more interested in not being 
listed in WHOIS databases (with valid information) than they are in
being available for complaints, should be blocked.

	-Allen

-- 
Allen Smith			easmith@localhost
September 11, 2001		A Day That Shall Live In Infamy II
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin