Hi Leo On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 at 17:41, Leo Vegoda <leo@vegoda.org> wrote:
Yes. Policy is mutable. If 'AGGREGATED-BY-LIR' does not work then the community can get rid of it. But we have less than a year of experience with it so far. We can ask the RIPE NCC to report on its use.
A very revealing comment. Yes you can get rid of an "optional, minor, inconsequential feature that changes nothing" as it was described by the policy proposers. Some people said at the time they had no objection to it, but didn't see any use for it. What you cannot (easily) reverse is making assignments optional. I still believe that, for many people involved in that discussion, this was what their minds were focused on. Now that has been achieved, perhaps few if any people care what happens with aggregation... I have never said that assignments must remain in the RIPE Database for eternity. But it was such a major change to the RIPE Database, with so much impact on many stakeholders, we should have had a full and open discussion on that specific topic and reached a consensus. Then we could have discussed aggregation type features. But it was slipped in through the back door. Hidden behind the words 'that changes nothing'. Even when I exploded that myth, we still didn't have a proper discussion on such a major change. (Just like brexit again.) The discussion at RIPE 87 was totally inconclusive and as Gert said at the end of that talk, there were more questions that needed to be answered. But they were never answered. This is why I am still aggrieved by 2023-04. We pushed through a minor change that some people considered pointless, and now we acknowledge could be reversed. But on the back of that, we made the biggest (irreversible?) change to the RIPE Database as a public registry since it was created as an operator's contact list, even though most people admitted we didn't understand much of the data contained therein. We still don't have an understanding of what this public registry is in the 2020s. We only, collectively and partially, remember what it was in the 1990s. cheers denis
Kind regards,
Leo Vegoda, for the co-chairs