In message <51C2F0A3.8040302@heanet.ie>, Brian Nisbet <brian.nisbet@heanet.ie> wrote:
I'm going to snip a lot of this mail, but there's a core issue I'd like to address.
Now, imagine for a moment that The Duchy of Grand Fenwick (google it) has just passed a law _requiring_ all of its citizens to spam. What is RIPE going to do? Issue each citizen of Grand Fenwick his or her own /24? In short, at what point does respect for the individuality and authority of the constituent nations and municipalities of the entire RIPE region cross over into unambiguous lunacy?
It's an interesting hypothetical, certainly. There are a number of possible options. The first is that the EU, or just the Netherlands, became aware of this and said "These people are bad, EU companies may not trade with them". The RIPE NCC operates under Dutch law, so they would be forced to stop doing business with those people.
A highly unlikely scenario, I think you will agree.
The second may be that while these companies may be legitimate businesses the NCC is aware of the local law and says, "Ah, no, we know, for a fact, that you are mandated to use these resources for network abuse, therefore your application is invalid."
Again, based upon the current available evidence, also a highly unlikely scenario.
The third option may be that the law is passed, the resources are handed out and the RIPE community, so incensed by this, writes a policy that allows for far more invasive deregistration and closure steps and the membership of the NCC signs off on this. It would be... fun (fcvo fun) to watch and I suspect Nigel may cry.
I'm not even sure which specific Nigel you are referring to, but I for one could live with that.
Of course in amongst all of this I would suspect if the resources were handed out, there would be a lot of depeering and null routing going on in relation to the poor, forced-to-spam, citizens of the Grand Duchy. :)
Once again, based upon the available evidence, I would claim that it would in fact be improbable that any substantial amount of deppeering and/or null routing would occur, in practice. It is a classic "trajedy of the commons" problem, and no operator would wish to have to explain to its user base why they, end end lusers, can no longer send e-mail to their cousins in Grand Fenwick. Regards, rfg