[ncc-services-wg] IP geolocation services

With my DB-WG Chair hat on:

Trying to - with reasonable accuracy - deduct geo-location-info for a
particular end-system using a particualr address, at a particular point in
time, from a block registered in a particular RIR's DB as an assignment is
very bad idea to begin with.

At least for the RIPE-DB, there are no agreed or definend semantics for
the interpretation of the country: attribute. The data is a hint, at best.

Actually, the country codes entered could point to the home country of a
particular LIR's administrative location, to the location of the responsible
NOC (operating from abroad) or something altogether, completely, arbitrary.
Also, there are the codes "ZZ" and "EU", neither of which is clearly defined
regarding its meaning.

Just to fill in some background: a while ago we had the discussion in the
DB-WG proposing to completely remove the country attribute for the reasons
given. However, we received input that requested the country data to be
kept, but *purely* for statistical reasons! It was understood that the
accuracy and quality of that sort of data is just good enough exclusively
for *that* pupose - but not really for something else and least for basing
operational decisions on!

Now, taking off my DB-WG hat....

My personal feeling is that the RIRs' databases are definitely the wrong
place to maintain such (volatile) data (in many cases for subranges of
registry entries!) and the RIRs are the wrong organisatins to get involved
with such a "service".

And, to top it off, with mobile users and tunnels, the whole concept of
managing access to data or services based on an IP address is going to brake
more often than it does already ;-)

Wilfried

Vegard Svanberg wrote:

> We've recently experienced a storm of customer complaints after starting
> to use IP addresses from a new allocation/assignment. The IP block was
> earlier in use by a German company. The result is that services like
> Google and Yahoo assume users are from Germany and presents content
> accordingly. Some users have also reported that they are excluded from
> certain services.
> 
> A quick web search reveals that this is a pretty common problem.
> 
> While not blaming RIPE or the other RIRs, we believe this problem should
> be addressed, and that the initiative has to come from the RIRs.
> 
> I would like to propose that RIPE NCC works together with other RIRs to
> see if it's possible to implement procedures/routines to notify
> providers and users of IP geolocation services of new, relocated and
> deleted allocations.
> 
> Also, one should probably consider if it's a need for a (distributed?)
> database with more fine-grained location data than the whois database
> currently provides (also, I've been told that licensing issues prohibits
> geolocation providers from using the RIR DBs directly, but I've not been
> able to verify this).
> 
> Apologies in advance if this has been discussed before -- I searched the
> archive, but got no hits. 
>