We have published a draft document for the proposal described in 2006-04.
From the draft document: By making the wording of the existing policy about contact information in the RIPE Database more explicit, we should see less spam and abuse and more rapid correction in network operations.
I question the logic of this proposal. While I also would like to see less spam and more rapid correction of network operational issues, I do not believe that this policy addresses these problems at all. A spammer that wants to comply with this policy change merely needs to maintain an abuse contact that delivers all complaints to an email robot which discards them in the same way that the RIPE hostmaster robot discards queries from unknown email addresses. But the policy has a larger problem. It attempts to place a stricter requirement on every organization which has received an assignment from a RIPE member. In this way it places a requirement on virtually every organization, commercial and non-commercial, which exists within our society. I do not believe that this is justified and I do not believe that most organizations have any real role to play in preventing spam or correcting network operational issues. The real issue here is that current RIPE policies allow RIPE members to wash their hands of all network operational issues associated with the addresses which they have assigned to other organizations. It would be far better to fix this policy by making it clear that there is one and only one organization responsible for network operational issues related to an allocated block and that is the RIPE member who received the allocation. If they want to have internal processes and contractual agreements that delegate some of that responsibility, that is OK, but they must nevertheless remain the primary point of contact. RIPE can impose an obligation on organizations who have received an allocation directly from RIPE and it can easily police such an obligation. But once 3rd parties enter the situation, RIPE can only make a lot of noise and create policies that have no teeth which no one really has to follow. The rules and policies surrounding the RIPE database are part of the tradition that we have been blindly following since the days of the ARPAnet when it was neccessary to record all users of the network in order to justify budget allocations. The network climate has change around us but the policies have not sufficiently evolved to meet the new environment. --Michael Dillon