In message <CAKvLzuHcgqrbZC_1r6_ziJz0NKrSWAVYk4VQJWZ+ut+6Cey8iQ@mail.gmail.com>,
denis walker <ripedenis@gmail.com> wrote:

>Although I have nothing to do with the questionnaire, I am curious
>what information you believe 'someone' wants to hide, or maybe you
>think has already been hidden, that has never before been hidden in
>this traditionally open whois?

It is quite clear and apparent that some people in the RIPE community,
and perhaps even some people in this WG, want to bend over backwards to
accomodate -alleged- concerns that -ostensibly- spring from GDPR.

I'm sorry to have to say this, but you Europeans have grossly over-reacted
to the avarice and greed of what are admittedly mostly American social
media companies, including but not limited to Facebook, and their
rapacious and never ending quest for yet more personal data and yet
more ways to monetize that. Their actions are and were totally egregious,
but the pendulum has now swung in the entire opposite directly, and by
so doing is daily hampering legitimate investigations of law enforcement
and others.

In short the over-compensation for the illness called Facebook had given
us GDPR, and with the same predictability as night following day, we are
now in a situation where WHOIS records for -domain names- are by and
large useless for -any- purpose, because greedy and self-seving domain
name registrars around the world have used GDPR as a convenient excuse
to do what they all have wanted to do for a long long time and for their
own selfish business reasons, i.e. redacting literally EVERYTHING from
domain name WHOIS records, with total disregard for the dividing line
between personal information and non-personal information.

Now I see this same sickness and over-compensation starting to influence
and affect the WHOIS records for IP blocks and ASNs.  I was hoping that
it would not come to this, but the privacy-at-all-costs maniacs have
now teamed up with the cyber-criminal interests to try to erase ALL of
the historical vestiges of WHOIS, even for IP space.

I can and will provide concrete evidence and examples of the erosion of
the validity of IP block WHOIS records.  I know of plenty such in the
RIPE region, in the ARIN region, and in the AFRINIC region.  But I'll
save those examples for subsequent messages.   In the meantime, to
answer your question more directly, you asked what is it that I fear may
be hidden that was previously open.  I call your attention to what I had
already noted about the unambiguously biased way in which the survey
questions were formulated so as to produce the (apparently desired)
result of creating a seeming consdensus to discard, delete, and redact
various parts of what we have historically known to be "WHOIS".  Here
again is Exhibit A in support of my point:


>>     *)  QUESTION:  What would you prefer?
>>
>>           1)  To be beaten and strangled to death?
>>           2)  To die of a horrible communicable infectious disease?
>>           3)  To be mercifully euthanized in your sleep?
>>
>> How about (4) NONE OF THE ABOVE?...
>>...
>> Here is a concrete example from the questionaire:
>>
>>    * 16. Rank this contact information from most (1) to least (3) important
>>      to facilitate Internet operations in the RIPE Database:
>>
>>       Email address
>>       Phone number
>>       Fax number
>>
>> Well, hardly anyone ever sends FAXes anymore, so that one is a no-brainer.
>> But the way the question has been formulated, it is obvious that *someone*
>> wants to get rid of either phone numbers or email addresses in the contact
>> data for various assigned resources, and that answers to this carefully
>> crafted (and methodologically bogus) questionare are going to be used as
>> a lame excuse to do that.

Clearly if there had been a desire to *maintain* *both* email addresses
*and* phone numbers (often useful for out-of-band communications) then
this survey question should *not* have asked the participant to rate
one over the other.  THEY ARE BOTH ESSENTIAL AND BOTH MUST BE PRESERVED.

The very fact that so many of the survey questions were formulated in this
same fashion... where the question itself seems to imply some foregone
conclusion about stuff that will in future be *deleted* from WHOIS...
makes the motives and intentions of this entire survey enterprise and
the people who formulated it suspect.

Yes, if forced to make a choice, I would prefer to be mercifully euthanized
in my sleep, rather that being strangled to death or dying of some
horrible disease.  But my first choice... just continuing to live and
be well... doesn't even seem to be offered on the menu of choices in this
survey!  Nor does the option of just leaving well enough alone when it
comes to the data that is currently present, and that has historically been
present, within the RIPE WHOIS data base.


Regards,
rfg



P.S.  The old saying is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."  What problem,
specifically were the people who designed this survey trying to solve?