Hi Leo,
The most elegant part is, that the next step will be easier.
I think this is a problematic statement. It implies that this is the first step on a road towards a destination we have not yet been informed about. At the very least, it would have been courteous to publish a roadmap document prior to publishing the policy proposal, so that participants in the WG can review it in the context you intend it to have.
I do not have a roadmap, but community has. And community asks over and over again what could be done about data accuracy. If community wants the Task Force to take care of this as well, the Task Force will be happy to do so. But if the community does not want the Task Force to take care of it, we will not do it. Maybe somebody else will come up with an idea, as I already did a few month ago with a proposal which I have withdrawn to get things sorted out in the Task Force. Sorry if this sounded like we are already having a masterplan in the pockets and we are not willed to share with you, that is not the case. But it is the case that we are listening to the discussions on the mailinglist and the meetings and wanted to make things more clean and clear for whomever will come up with and idea about improving data accuracy.
I have no problem with improving the abuse reporting system but from my perspective, adding way to embed e-mail addresses in the database is not going to help significantly. The people who want abuse reports to so they can correct issues with their networks already have ways to publish that information and the people who don't want to deal with reports will either not use the proposed abuse-c objects or will populate them with broken data.
This proposal is not only about putting something into DB as it was done by APNIC and will hopefully be done by AfriNIC soon. In both these regions there was no possibility to add abuse contact information. In the RIPE region the point is that we have to many options and womtimes these options break things. And the main point of the Task Force was, to come up with a solution that fixes the variety we have at the moment and find "the place" to store abuse-contact information. And that is exactly what we did.
New ways of putting information into the database will not fix abuse report handling. Unless you share your broader vision for how abuse report handling will improve, all this proposal does is add cost to RIPE NCC members and confusion to naive database users.
And again this has never been the intention of this proposal. Such a proposal will never fix abuse report handling. Because handling incoming abuse reports is the business of every single ISP and not of RIPE NCC or RIPE as a community. The intention is to make it easier and clearer to publish and find the relevant things and maybe in a next step if community wants us to take care of focus on data accuracy. I do not see that this will make things more complicated to naive users. Imho the opposite is the case. The naive user should use the abuse finder tool which is already in place and would run much easier than today (150 db queries to get one single email address is just crazy). The naive user has to learn how to add abuse contact information in either way (old style or new style). And I as a naive user would rather know exactly what I have to do than thinking about what might be the right place to add information. I have no idea about the costs of this and I'm not sure if this is a relevant factor to decide if a proposal is good or not. Thanks for your feedback, Tobias -- abusix