Re: [anti-spam-wg@localhost] Contacts

[Nick Foobar <]

> Basically RIPE administration is just doing the minimal amount to
> collect their pensions.  No leadership, no concern about fraud or
> negligence in the database.

Jeffrey, your document states many things which many people would like
to see.  However, your proposed role for registrars is completely
unworkable in practice:

> Registrars shall ensure that contact data are active and that contact 
> addresses (e.g. Postmaster and RFC-recommended role accounts) are 
> properly operated by registrants.   Failure to provide correct current 
> and complete contact data, failure to enable or to properly operate a 
> role account, shall be deemed a cause for Admonishment and, if default 
> continues, Enforcement per infra.

Let's take a scenario which happened regularly during my time as lir
manager:  ISP registers contact X for company Y in RIPE database. 
Contact X leaves company without notifying ISP, and information in RIPE
database becomes stale.  Who's to blame for this?  How can it be
rectified?

As for dealing with the complexity of the problem, take the difficulty
of dealing with an individual situation like this, multiply the
situation across 10E{3,4,5}'s of records for each company, multiply by a
suitable factor to take into account the difficulty of maintaining
multiple contact databases per company (it happens and it's not going to
change), and then multiply by the number of LIR's.  It is a practically
impossible task.  As Barbie might say, "Information management is
hard!".

RIPE requires that members adheres to its policy documents, but policing
these is an entirely different matter, and certainly something that RIPE
could not do without very significant effort and investment of
substantial resources on an ongoing basis.  And if you're looking for a
means of combating spam, the money required to provide this service
would almost certainly be better spent elsewhere.

Nick