[ipv6-wg at ripe.net] RE: [6bone] /20 allocated - update your BGP filters!

On Tue, 2004-05-11 at 10:57, Engin Gunduz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2004-05-11 09:40:10 +0200, Gert Doering wrote:
> > Hi,
<SNIP>
> > It's not necessarily confined to actual EU countries, nor does it mean
> > "all of the EU" - just "more than one country so you can't easily tack
> > a single country code on it".
> > 
> > This definition isn't perfect, but does the job...
> 
> I'm not too sure about it. 'EU' is ambiguous here: does the data owner
> mean European Union? Or Europe as a continent? Or the RIPE service region?
> Or just 'many countries'?
> Unfortunately, we allow the code 'EU' without defining what it actually means in the
> RIPE Whois Database...  In different inetnums/inet6nums it is used to mean
> different things.

<SNIP>

> We will post the outcome of the discussion that took place in the session
> later to db-wg and address-policy mailing lists.  As far as I can remember, 
> although there wasn't a real consensus, the working group advised to either
> remove "country:" attribute from inet(6)nums or make it optional.

Removing the attribute would loose a lot of precious information
especially when trying to do statistics and looking where there is real
usage of certain netblocks. This is for instance also used by many
services to 'localize' the data. Eg when you use www.google.com you will
be redirected to google.nl when in .nl or google.ch when in .ch.
Same for eg php.net and quite some others. Or even simpler, just showing
the correct language based on the origin IP (okay people could use the
language-accept in HTTP for this ;) Another example of use is IRC
servers which generate I-lines based on country of origin.

Next to that some people just like to know where connections are coming
from and using whois is a great tool to at least know the source country
(of course someone could ssh to a box in another country etc... blabla)

Making it optional thus is a possibility, another option would be
to define the 'eu' wording or better add 'global' as a value.

Anyhow, removing it is a no-go IMHO.

Greets,
 Jeroen

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