Dear Nick,

Thanks for your email.

We are planning a clean-up of these ROUTE objects. As we wanted to avoid deleting any legitimate objects of third parties, we checked with AFRINIC and they have now confirmed that these ROUTE(6) objects can be deleted.
We also performed a check on all of the NONAUTH database for any ROUTE(6) objects (using the prefix only), we found 81 routes (out of 56,379) and 37 ROUTE6 (out of 1,568) that are not "allocated", "assigned", "available", "reserved" in any region. We will now inform the object holder and remove these objects.

We don’t think a policy is necessary for this work, but we strongly believe we need an approach similar to NWI-5: "Inform the object holder that these IRR object(s) refer to an unallocated space. We will then delete them after a reasonable notification." This gives people time to react in cases of incorrect de-registration. We will initiate a discussion with the other RIRs to find a joint approach on how we deal with similar incidents in the future.

We have also looked into publishing a list of deregistered resources and this will require some review internally if we plan to go down that route. A more straightforward approach might be for the RIRs to proactively highlight where we see objects in each others IRRs.

Kind regards,

Marco Schmidt
Registry Services Assistant Manager
RIPE NCC

From: Nick Hilliard via db-wg <db-wg@ripe.net>
Date: Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 17:21
Subject: Re: [db-wg] [anti-abuse-wg] 196.52.0.0/14 revoked, cleanup efforts needed
To: Niall O'Reilly <niall.oreilly@ucd.ie>
Cc: Database WG <db-wg@ripe.net>, Mirjam Kuehne <chair@ripe.net>

Niall O'Reilly wrote on 22/01/2021 09:55:
> Creating a policy seems to me to be too heavy an approach in this case.
>
> I would think that a simple request from the DB WG to the NCC
> should be enough.
>
> If a greater degree of formality were considered necessary,
> a new NWI could be created.

there are two issues here: the immediate one relates to removal of these
particular objects, but there's a longer term issue of whether the NCC
needs to be asked by the community to delete all objects which are
deregistered from the other LIRs on an ongoing basis.  Honestly I would
have thought probably not because this sounds like the sort of thing
that falls into general garbage cleanup, i.e. normal stewardship of
resources.

Could someone from the NCC clarify what the current situation with this
is?  Is this something which is currently dealt with, and if not, could
it be?

The reverse is also relevant. I.e. the RIPE NCC probably needs to
publish lists of resources which have been deregistered so that other
RIRs / IRRDBs can delete objects which refer to those resources which
date from before the date of deregistration.

Nick