On Monday, October 24, 2016, Carsten Schiefner <ripe-wgs.cs@schiefner.de> wrote:

Hi Ciprian -

On 23.10.2016 16:39, Ciprian Nica wrote:
> On Sunday, October 23, 2016, Erik Bais <ebais@a2b-internet.com
> <mailto:ebais@a2b-internet.com>> wrote:
> When we made the parts that needed to be published in the transfer
> statistics, that have crossed my mind, but I failed to see what the
> benefit is for the community.
>
> The benefit would be that the community can make an idea about whether a
> broker's info can be reliable or not. There are brokers that never
> brokered a transaction.

from this point of view, I could call myself a mathematician, a knitter,
a carpenter, a plumber and a rocket scientist at the same time. It's
just that I haven't yet carried out either one of their usual tasks and
activities.

The reality is: a broker that hasn't brokered any deal yet, is most
likely not (yet) a broker, but for the time being just a wannabe-broker
at best.

Agree, and there are many of them.

> I can understand from your point why you would ask this, but I'm not
> going to take this suggestion in this policy.
>
> I am also a member of this community, besides being your competitor and
> although you wouldn't like people to see that I've brokered the most
> transfers, it's quite possible you would broker more transfers than me
> in the future. We all do our jobs good and my proposal is not just
> for advertising, I really think people would like to see it.

I'd also love to get ad space for free from the RIPE NCC for my
business, but won't and don't even want to. As such, e.g. real estate
agents are not mentioned in the official land register either.

The free ad space is already there. There is a list of brokers on ripe website.

I do see, however, your point that people may want to background check
their IP broker of potential choice: for this purpose I'd like to
suggest the formation of an IP Broker association that would define
quality definitions, measurements and such - as e.g. the above mentioned
real estate agents have already given numerous good examples for.

I don't think that would be easy to achieve but it's a good idea.

But please do not overload the NCC's tray here - I do fully agree with
Erik in this regard.

There is, though, an important thing which I think the policy needs to address. The broker should be allowed to discuss with ripe on behalf of his customers. It has happened several times that we had customers who don't understand english very well and many times they would just ask us to write the reply and they would simply copy/paste it. It would help if ripe would allow us to directly pass on information and answer ripe's questions.