Brian Storey wrote on 30/09/2023 00:03:
For me it comes down to this. As a community & considering the permitted exceptions (individuals & P2P assignments):-
1) Is the publication of End User entities for an assignment important? 2) Is the publication of a prefix assignment boundary between end users important?
Brian, thanks for this thoughtful analysis of this proposal. These two questions are indeed the crux of this issue. I'm also surprised at Angela's answers, but let's deal with the intent of the policy for the time being, namely whether the RIPEDB should or shouldn't include information about end user assignments and the entities to which they are assigned. My take is that, in theory, there would be a good deal of merit in publishing both if there were some way of ensuring that this data was accurate and well-maintained. However, from a practical point of view, there's a large amount of inaccurate and stale data in the RIPE database. A lot of effort has been expended over the last 30 years to attempt to address this problem, but no good solutions have been found and the outcome If we haven't solved this problem in 30 years, and if there are no proposals on the table to address data quality issue, I'd speculate that it's unlikely we'll solve the RIPE DB's data quality issues any time soon, and maybe now it would be appropriate to have a good, hard think about whether it's worth keeping this policy at all. But, speculation is not an appropriate substitute for fact. A better starting point for addressing the underlying data quality issue might be to formally measure it. There's ~4.7m inetnum/inet6num PA assignment registrations in the database. A quick check with a sample size calculator suggests that examining around 500 random inetnums / inet6nums for an a/b data quality outcome would give a result with 98% confidence, ~5% error margin. Is there an appetite for examining this in the DB-WG + the RIPE NCC? Nick