Dear Edward,

Many thanks for trying to engage with entities related to RIPE-NONAUTH.

On Fri, Oct 10, 2025 at 03:00:12PM +0200, Edward Shryane wrote:
> The NCC were asked to solicit feedback from those who would have
> objects deleted due to the proposed cleanup of the RIPE-NONAUTH
> database. We emailed a notification to users on the 15th September.
> 
> We found 16,497 RIPE-NONAUTH route(6) prefix matching an RPKI VALID
> ROA. We sent 514 notification emails to the maintainers of those
> objects.

Did any users respond to these 514 notifications?

> We matched 27,449 RIPE-NONAUTH route(6), as-set, aut-num objects which
> primary key exactly matched an object in an authoritative RIR
> database. We sent 1,635 notification emails to the maintainers of
> those objects.
> 
> We received replies from 33 users. 10 of those users confirmed that a
> total of 15 object(s) could be deleted and 23 asked us not to delete a
> total of 113 objects. 
> 
> To summarise the feedback on why they still need the objects:
> * Objects belong to a third party hosting company or CDN. The ISP is just 
> hosting those resources.
> * They are the maintainer of the NONAUTH objects. However, the objects are 
> being used by ISPs.
> * The maintainer is actively using those NONAUTH resources.
> * They cannot control how the multiple service providers handle traffic. They 
> had some issues in the past due to some policies written by those 
> organisations.
> * Creation of ROA or ROUTE objects (with the same structure) is not possible 
> in ARIN.
> * Network complications. They cannot get transit in their own country. They 
> use a VPN to Europe. So, they need to be registered in NONAUTH.
> * Satellite service provider which customers that use their network.
> * The user is busy and doesn’t have time for checking this.
> * They are the owners of those objects and are using them.

So 23 users indicated they'd rather not have the objects deleted. It
seems to be a very very small group compared to the overall number of
outreach attempts that RIPE NCC performed. There is no doubt in my mind
that many of the resources (non-exclusively) listed in RIPE-NONAUTH
currently are in actual use, but from that fact it doesn't necessarily
logically follow that because those resources are in use - it is
necessitated to have objects in RIPE-NONAUTH. I wonder if the users are
aware that they can continue using the resources without RIPE-NONAUTH
object.

A nit: I can't say I feel super sympathetic towards (some of the) users
stating "i don't have time for this", but I do appreciate the honesty :-)

The feedback that ROA/ROUTE creation is not possible with ARIN obviously
does not apply to the 16,497 RIPE-NONAUTH objects which are RPKI VALID
(without RPKI ROA those wouldnt be VALID, and if an operator can make a
ROA they also can make a route object).

It probably doesn't come as much of a surprise given the rich
multi-decade history of this dataset, but it seems there are different
categories of users with slightly different needs... which may help
provide a path towards deprecation by doing continuing step by step.

> We found the feedback useful, in particular the importance of
> notifying maintainers in advance and allowing them to opt-out if they
> are still using the objects. However the continued use of RIPE-NONAUTH
> will make it more difficult to deprecate the database in the future.
> 
> Please let me know your feedback on our findings. I will also present
> at the DB-WG session at RIPE91 for discussion.

With the survey results in mind, is it considered feasible to proceed
with the suggestion to delete "RPKI VALID" route objects from the
RIPE-NONAUTH dataset?

Kind regards,

Job
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