Any process, transparent or not - has to have teeth. And any transparency need exist only between RIPE NCC and the LIR or other party with whom they have a contract (and an AUP, and various other policies). Nobody expects RIPE NCC to immediately revoke any IP allocation without its own due diligence. And whether or not a complainer opts in, I would not expect RIPE NCC to publish any complaint data (unless specifically anonymized, and aggregated).

The issue here is not whether RIPE NCC reports the largely redundant proposed statistics back to the community - reclaimed IP space is already reported out. The issue is whether RIPE NCC's policies, especially in LIR allocated IP space, are effective to prevent fraudulent registrations, and to weed them out when detected. And whether RIPE NCC staff has the will to enforce these policies, regardless of the size of the customer involved.

The only transparency that is actually required (given that data on available and reclaimed v4 space is already reported) is that any new receiver of this reclaimed space would have to be told upfront that the space is poisoned for any further use thanks to its previous ownership. SMTP blocks only, if all there was, was bulk mail .. but IP space reclaimed from a botnet operation would very probably be nullrouted all over the place.

--srs

On Tuesday, January 22, 2013, Shane Kerr wrote:

Suresh,

[ using your top-posting style in this reply, to avoid "crossing the
streams" ]

We can have transparent processes, that have no "teeth" as you say.

We can also have strict policies that are enforced in secret.

Both transparency and effectiveness are important.

I do think ISPs are more likely to support a fair and transparent
policy that will punish abusers than they will to support a fair and
secretive policy that will punish abusers, because they will have no
guarantees that they will be safe under such a system.

Cheers,

--
Shane

On Tuesday, 2013-01-22 07:20:26 +0530,
Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think we are missing the main point rfg raised and going around in
> circles about transparency.
>
> How do we give enough teeth to ripe ncc's audit processes, and it's ip
> allocation processes, especially through LIRs, so that the issue we
> are concerned about is mitigated?