On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:22 PM, Chris
<chrish@consol.net> wrote:
ripe is the community. ripe ncc is just there to help organize. it handles coordination of ips and ases, as (or: where) they have to be unique. the only reason why ripe doesn't simply hand out any number of resources to anybody is that these are finite (well, in fact, otherwise ripe simply wouldn't exist). the only decisions on handing out resources done at ripe are regarding fairness (and subordinate/derived technical decisions on coordination). that's what constitutes its legitimacy. apart from that it is totally irrelevant who the requesting party is or is not.
I am sorry but yes I do understand that difference. I do still maintain that being the custodian of v4 and v6 address space for the RIPE community, RIPE NCC has a fiduciary (for lack of a better word, this isn't finance) responsibility to detect and deny fraudulent IP allocations.
what you are wailing about is criminal proceedings, policing (and actually also judiciary and legislative proceedings, but i think you probably didn't realise that). this is the job of law courts and police, so you should refer to them.
The problem is when they start to refer to the RIR. Which might happen sooner rather than later.
That quote about "the police COULD HAVE VIEWED giving RBN an LIR status and lots of IP space as a money laundering offense" is entirely correct. In other words, a slightly more hard nosed cop and/or a more critical situation than that might trigger law enforcement or regulatory action because "I didn't know" is very rarely a valid excuse, and which is why several other more regulated industries have rather stricter due diligence requirements than what we're seeing here.