[AfriNIC-rpd] abuse contact information in whois database (AFPUB-2010-GEN-002)

[Owen DeLong]

While this is not my region, I was present for the debate at the meeting and I do
have some opinions on the subject which I will share below. I do not believe it
is my role to support or oppose the policy, I offer these opinions merely for the
consideration of others:

I think that an optional abuse-c person object is a better solution. It is far simpler
for people to implement both at the RIR and the ISP/End-user level. People that
want to provide an abuse contact can do so, and, people that do not want to provide
one can expect abuse reports to go to their other contacts. I don't see this as an
unreasonable situation as it has worked reasonably well in the ARIN region for
some time.

If you need to query more than 250 abuse-c contacts per day from a given RIR,
I would argue that you are probably doing something other than legitimate abuse
reporting. As such, I do not see the whois query rate restrictions as a significant
barrier.

Making the contact field mandatory has a number of implementation details not
considered by the author, such as interim database referential integrity issues (the
time during which some organizations do not have IRT objects and yet this is a
mandatory field). These are not insurmountable, but, I believe that it creates an
unnecessary burden without much benefit over the simple abuse-c field added
to the organization and possibly other object records.

Owen