[rpd] Opposing the last call made on the review policy

[Owen DeLong]

> On Dec 4, 2018, at 11:41 , Alan Barrett <alan.barrett at afrinic.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 4 Dec 2018, at 20:29, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> My bigger problem is with the ability for an arbitrary third party to, under this proposal, make an accusation with no basis in fact and no supporting evidence triggering a huge amount of work on the part of both AfriNIC and the target organization.
> 
> I interpreted clause 13.3.3(B) of the proposal to mean that AFRINIC staff have the discretion to decide that a particular complaint does not have sufficient evidence to warrant investigation.  It would be good to clarify this in the text.

If that’s actually true, it does significantly reduce (though not eliminate) the potential for this proposal to create unsubstantiated witch hunts. Unfortunately, the wording is rather ambiguous in that it states “community complaint made abasing them that warrants investigation”. It is unclear what standard is applied to meet the terms “warrants investigation” or by whose decision that standard is determined. The next sentence could be interpreted to clarify that, but it includes the inherent assumption that AfriNIC staff will conduct a review in all cases of a complaint, hence my concern.

Further, it’s not clear to me what constitutes a “resources portfolio”, thus I’m not sure what, if any, limitation is implied by the words “…not applicable to a member with the same resources portfolio on which a full review has been completed in the preceding 24 months.”

Oddly, there’s no limitation here which prevents multiple simultaneous reviews of the same resources and the limitation clearly does not apply until the “full review” whatever that actually means is completed.

So, as an additional objection to this policy, 13.3.3(b) is so ambiguous and vaguely constructed that I’m not sure it constitutes implementable policy.

Owen