[cooperation-wg] publication of data about legacy resources

On 22 Sep 2014, at 13:06, Roland Perry <roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:

>> Well, we both know that for this specific case Roland the holding entity does still exist. It just has a different name.
> 
> Not really. The entity has been "reorganised", the address allocation used elsewhere within government via various departments concerned with "delivery" of government services. It's actually quite messy.

True. But that's internal detail for the address holder which is nobody else's business.

>> We understand that FUBAR is the current address holder and contact for FOO/8.
> 
> This is the crux - how does IANA come to the understanding?

It could poll the holders of these /8s once a year. Or ask them to keep the info about those allocations up to date. No big deal. There are only a handful of /8s which could be problematical. And since IPv4 is just about used up, it's hard to see why anyone should be worrying about those legacy /8s. As I said before, if someone thinks this really matters, they are welcome to feed their concerns into the IANA oversight discussions.

> But it does matter if (one or more of): The building whose address is mentioned has closed, the phone numbers and emails don't work any more, the named person has retired, the addresses appear to be used by completely different bits of the government as well.

Yeah. But this is no different from a teeny subset of the problem space for whois in the context of domain names. All of the above concerns (and more) exist for domain names. The world just has to cope with that, even if the answers are not to everyone's liking.

Frankly, I think it's a waste of time focusing on whois at all. IMO what we should be concentrating on is how concerned stakeholders get access to timely and accurate data about holders of Internet resources in general. whois is not the answer. It's just not up to the job and was never intended to provide the functionality some people expect it to provide today. However this takes us well into layer 9+ territory where any mention of the w-word results in screaming and endless pain.