Upcoming Improvements to ARIN's Directory Service

Thu Jun 10 21:26:19 UTC 2010

> Apparently we're supposed to be going all Web 2.0 now.

Web 2.0 can handle bulk transfers of data just fine.

I wonder if this is somehow related to privacy and data protection laws.

Just recently, RIPE announced that they were going to block bulk
transfers as a result of data protection laws, presumably because some
law has just changed. Obviously ARIN is under a different legal regime
than RIPE, however data protection has recently been a hot button
issue in the USA and it is possible that something similar will
happen. Given the importance of case law in the USA, as opposed to
legislation, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of legal
review going on.

But again, as far as technology goes, HTTP is a superior file transfer
protocol to FTP, so the move to Web 2.0 RESTful transactions over HTTP
does not give any technical reason to stop bulk transfers. In fact, it
may just be an oversight so you should really ask them Clearly, if
nobody bothers to ask about bulk transfers, then nobody uses them and
nobody cares, so shutting them down is the right thing to do.

--Michael Dillon