2006-6 Previous Version [Archived]

View the current policy proposal text.

The following version was archived on May 4, 2006.

Policy statement

Policy Proposal Name: Bulk WHOIS agreement expiration clarification

Author: Bill Woodcock

Proposal Version: 1.0

Proposal type: Modify

Policy term: Permanent

Policy statement: Text added to the end of “3.1. Bulk Copies of ARIN’s WHOIS”:

If no term of validity or expiration date is included in the policy or AUP, it shall be deemed valid upon acceptance by ARIN and shall conclude after thirty days notice by ARIN, immediately upon cancellation by the other signatory, or immediately upon a violation of its terms. If an expiration date is included, ARIN shall provide thirty days notice prior to the expiration of an AUP agreement, in order that the data recipient shall have the opportunity to receive uninterrupted service.

Policy Rationale

Presently, there is no expiration date specified in either the AUP agreement nor in the policy. ARIN whois data recipients receive an FTP login to an ARIN server, which unexpectedly stops working one day, breaking lots of scripts, causing gaps in datasets, and causing people to waste a lot of time debugging, only to find that the login has been deactivated with no forewarning. If ARIN staff are going to arbitrarily decide to “expire” an agreement which has no defined expiration, doing so unilaterally and without notice is an extraordinarily bad idea.

Let me just say that I think it’s really pitiful that we should need to use the policy process to micromanage operations at this level. But believe me, I wouldn’t be wasting my time writing something this trivial if it weren’t necessary to solve an actual problem.

Timetable for implementation: Immediate.