[AfriNIC-rpd] Definitions of LIR versus End User

[Andrew Alston]

Hi All,

During the discussions week before last in the context of the a university application, it became pretty clear fairly quickly that the community did not believe that the policy that was proposed was necessary.  Hence, since that policy was not FORMALLY proposed through the system, it is being withdrawn on the list and we will not be continuing with that proposal.

That being said, there was indication from a few members of the community that it was perhaps time to clean up the definitions of LIR versus EU, and make sure these definitions were clear enough to avoid confusion.

I've since been doing some digging to see what the current definitions in AfriNIC policy actually state, and here is what I found:

Section 5.3 of AFPUB-2005-v4-001 says:

5.3 Local Internet Registry (LIR)
A Local Internet Registry (LIR) is an IR that receives allocations from an RIR and primarily assigns address space to 'end-users'. LIRs are generally ISPs. Their customers are other ISPs and possibly end-users. LIRs must be members of AfriNIC.

This policy lacks a definition in its definition section for an end user.

In policy AFPUB-2006-GEN-001 we have a policy for the assignment of space to the end user, but again, there is no fixed definition of what an end user is.

I couldn't find any other definition of an End User in current policy, but its possible that I missed something.

Now this creates a problem, we have a policy line in AFPUB-2005-v4-001 that refers to something undefined, and an entire policy that refers to assignment of space to something undefined.

Hence, we need to create this definition to avoid future confusion, either in separate policy, or by modification of existent policies to include this definition.  

Once we create the end user definition though, it should automatically clean up the LIR definition, since the LIR definition will become a lot clearer with the context created.

So, I want to ask the following questions to the community:

A.) Do we want to simply modify existent policies to include the definition or do we want a separate policy that contains a list of definitions.  There are advantages to both approaches, the largest I see in the latter approach is that future policies would then have set definitions they could refer to without direct inclusion.
B.) Once we have defined the End User definition, is there any other need to attempt to modify the LIR definition
C.) What are the general community opinions about how an end user should be defined, are there any suggestions for this definition.  (I have a few, but I would rather hear the communities voice on this before making a proposal)

Thoughts and comments?

Andrew Alston

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