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Re: [Asrg] 6. Proposals - Legal - Subject labeling - FTC response

2003-12-03 07:25:34
On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 11:21:14AM -0800, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
[...]
  * Responsibility for defining label terms and their use is properly the
domain of the FTC, the role of the IETF would appear to be limited to
defining the mechanism by which the labels are expressed.

The IETF is global, and the standards it develops are not restricted to
the US.  While it is very tempting to simply use labels from CAN-SPAM,
what if the Chines Government (for example) produced similar laws, but
with different labels? (The US government has limited jurisdiction over
email that originates from China.)


[...]

  * The principal difficulty with use of keyword terms is the risk of
collision. This risk may be mitigated by defining some form of prefix scheme
analogous to the namespace scheme employed in XML. Keyword labels might be
encoded as USFTC:Spam or possibly IETF:Spam. It is likely that IANA
registration will be sufficient to avoid prefix collisions.

Perhaps, but there are other issues.  The common case in an IANA
registry is that one or more "technical experts" are annointed to pass
on additions to the registry, but that doesn't seem appropriate here. 
There is another possible model, that of the urn/uri registries, where
essentially anyone can register a schema, and obvious problems are
vetted via a mailing list of interested parties.  It's not clear that's
appropriate, either. 

Given that we are not the IETF and given that we report through the IAB and
given that political philosophy is out of scope that would appear to be the
sum total of the discussion of the topic here that has relevance.

OK, but... the IANA registry being hinted at seems to me to have some 
fairly unique characteristics, and it would probably be worth trying to 
outline at least some possibilities of how the IANA would manage it.

Regards

Kent

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent(_at_)icann(_dot_)org,kent(_at_)songbird(_dot_)com            lonesome."
p: +1 310 823 9358  f: +1 310 823 8649               -- Mark Twain


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