[ncc-services-wg] [anti-abuse-wg] 2013-01 New Policy Proposal (Openness about Policy Violations)

I just wanted to comment briefly on the proposal now under consideration.

I would have interjected quite a lot of follow-up comments on all of the
comments that have been made here so far about this, but I've been tied
up on other critical projects for the past several days.  I don't want
anybody to get the idea that I don't care about the proposal at hand.
I do, passionately, but I have rather a different take on it, I think,
than what I've seen expressed by others so far.

The point has been made that publishing (or re-publishing) baseless
accusations is un-good.  There probably won't be a lot of disagreement
on that general point.  But more generally I think it has to be recognized
that when it comes to the dispersal of information... accurate or otherwise...
the Internet is, and is likely to remain, very much the Wild Wild West,
and in the final analysis, there is not all that much that can be done
about most of the baseless slander that occurs on the Internet every day.

I'll just cite two cases in point.

The first is ripped from recent headlines:

  http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/06/go-daddy-sued-over-revenge-porn-site/1897695/

The general opinion among legal experts... with which I concur... is that
under current U.S. law GoDaddy, despite having itself hosted a web site
featuring "revenge" nude photos of ex-girlfriends, is not in any way
liable for that.  The ladies who have been offended by the web site in
question may indeed have suffered deep anguish, but they will need to seek
redress for those grievances elsewhere.

Second, I remember clearly that quite a number of years ago now I par-
ticipated, along with countless others, in a USENET newsgroup called
news.admin.net-abuse.email.  Back at that time, one of the most colorful
and unambiguously demented denizens of that newsgroup was a fellow going
by the name of "Dr. Grubor".

So anyway, long story short, Dr. Grubor, publically and in the neswgroup,
called me a paedophile.  Of course, there was no basis whatsoever for his
accusation, and I was understandably outraged.  I was preparing to initiate
legal action over Dr. Grubor's outrageous slander, and would probably have
done so if I had not realized, in sort order, that Dr. Grubor had already
accused about 80% of the other newsgroup participants of being paedophiles,
before he even got around to calling me one.

Given this reality, and that fact that Dr. Grubor's only remaining shreads
of credibility were with the small handful of other seriously ill newsgroup
participants, in the end I thought better of wasting my time and money
pursuing legal damages against a nutcase that no one of any importance
took seriously anyway.

All the above having been said, there are just two simple points I want
to make.

First, as illustrated by the above two anecdotes, it isn't really prag-
matically possible, here in the "information age", to stop people from
spreading hurtful material and/or bald faced lies about one, or about one's
company.

Second, whereas I agree completely that there should exist, somewhere, an
unfiltered uncensored place where people can post what they know, or even
what they believe they know about various Internet number resources
(and by implication, about the entities to which those have been assigned)
I am not persuaded that either RIPE or any other RiR either could be or
should be either the sponsors or the adminitsrators of any such web site.
Rather, I am coming around to the opinion that this kind of function
necessarily must be performed by, and must be under the control of some-
one or something that is distinctly _not_ connected, financially or
otherwise, to any of the RiRs, to IANA, to ICANN, or to the U.S.
Department of Commerce (from which, the authority and the responsibility
of all of thes other entities ultimately devolves).

I think that this whole discussion (and the proposal at hand) came up,
at least in part, because not everyone believes that RIPE is actively
policing the resources it is the ultimate steward of, without either
fear or favor.  Additionally, the completely lack of transparancy with
respect to such policing certainly contributes mightily to fostering
that exact viewpoint.  However I doubt that asking, demaning, or directing
RIPE itself to be more transparent about these matters is likely to provide
an actual solution to the perceived credibility gap.  A reference to foxes
and henhouses may be appropriate here.  If, at the direction of the
membership, RIPE NCC began publishing _some_ information, would anyone
ever feel 100% confident that they were publishing _all_ relevant infor-
mation?  I wouldn't, but then I am suspicious by nature.

Separately, there is indeed a legal liability issue inherent in this whole
idea that cannot just be swept under the carpet.  I rather doubt that there
is much in the way of a constituency, within the RIPE membership, that is
eager for RIPE NCC to go around wlly-nilly, sticking its neck into the
proverbial legal noose by publishing, or re-publishing potentially actionable
defamations.  Defending the indefensible, perhaps at considerable financial
cost, is not something I see as being on either RIPE's or RIPE NCC's agenda
anytime soon.  Journalism, for better or worse, is just not within the
fundamental purpose of these organizations, and I think that it will be
hard to find many RIPE member organizations who are eager to have their
annual fees increased in order to support a high-priced legal defense team.

For the reasons given above, at the present moment I believe that it
must necessarily fall to some outside and unrelated person, entity, or
organization to publish, without fear or favor, negative information
about Internet number resources and the parties to whom those have been
assigned.

I am currently contemplating whether or not I myself want to be that 
publisher.  So far, I am not favorably disposed to getting involved.
The problem is that quite a lot of work would be involved, I think, in
order to do a proper job, and I actually had a number of other things
that I wanted to do this lifetime.

Maybe if I could find two or three willing and able volunteers to help
in the construction and deployment of a simple web site...


Regards,
rfg