On Sat, 8 May 2004, leo vegoda wrote:
The point was that while all /48 assignments must be registered, they don't all need to be registered in Whois. I think the expectation is that the vast majority of address space users will have their address space registered in the LIR's private, internal database and not the public, Whois database. The drafters of the policy text had only intended to require registration in Whois when a single organisation received more than a /48.
I would urge you to reconsider. With IPv6 it is expected that almost all assignments to customers will actually be /48 as very very few customers actually need anything more then that (even large companies that currently might have /19 can be fine with /48 ip6). As such that basicly means the rir ip whois will no longer be of any use to do things research on geographical and other data on ip space, research on customers due to abuse or copyright complaints, confirmation and research on proper use of ip space by company (RIR are not the only entities that should be able to verify their claims - what if they claim something for their marketing and you know its not true, etc). Additionally considering how some (many) companies keep their internal "ip assignments" database I have this bad feeling that if you do not actually provide standard way to enter the information and requirement to keep it updated, that much of the data will never be entered and will not be kept updated which again might result in number of problems when you urgently need to find whose ip space it really is (and ISP helpdesks would be completely useless when its immediate problem and they themselve cant even identify who it is...). The correct way I think is to have clearly identified privacy policies (based on EU laws if its EU country I would suspect) what kind of information should the ISPs be required to provide in the whois and require that all /48 reassignments (but not /64s) be registered in whois but that information provided about the user (i.e. is address included or not) be based on that privacy policy. - William Leibzon Elan Networks william@elan.net