Sean Dorin wrote:
Eh? I can assure you that my colleagues and I will defend the
brand value of, for example, ebone.net, by only delegating subdomains
to Approved Entities. I am sure this is true of IBM.COM, and could
be true of a hypothetical owner of e.g. kids.tm or .kids.
This could be done in the case of Country/region code TLDs under the
control of the individual registries. It couldn't be done fairly the case
of the 'international' TLDs such as .COM .NET and .ORG or any new
non-country/region specific names because no two countries would agree on
the interpretation of the guidelines.
If it was pushed through it would have the result that one state, the US,
would be dictating what is right and good to the rest of the world. The
definition of acceptable is completely different in the US and Saudi-Arabia
for example.
The same is true of picking address pairs for 'kid safe' connections. The
criteria for acceptable systems can only be based on the national laws and
network addresses allocated to each country concerned. This means that the
administrator of a system in China may decide that the Australian
definition of 'Children safe' was OK but would block the networks in France
and the UK.
<snip>
No, no, they are really on to something. They should push for:
1/ a formal policy that makes a string of numbers an
item of intellectual property (following 1-800-FLOWERS example)
In which country, are numbers intellectual property everywhere ?
2/ an entity which is "kids safe" to be granted sole use
of a particular IPv6 routing prefix, and which will advertise
the existence of this "kids safe" prefix to all and sundry,
and will facilitate the use of addresses from within the prefix
by approved "kids safe" hosts, by -- including but not limited
to --
i/ forming a virtual topology to which "kids-safe" hosts, sites,
or ISPs can connect (a la 6bone)
ii/ negotiating with ISPs the carriage of globally-visible
subnets of the "kids-safe" prefix in some future "native"
IPv6 internet, if and only if the "kids-safe" protection
body approves the delegation of a complete subnet
Fine for one country in their allocated address space but not
internationally. I guess you could look at peering arrangements, more
administration .....
3/ the adoption by the IETF of a "pre-fabricated" source/destination
address pair selection algorithm which will at the very least:
-- always choose the "kids-safe" source address
(when sending SYNs to web servers, for example)
-- raise an alarm or reject connections which are
not to or from a "kids-safe" source or destination
Make it a generic algorithm which matches number ranges. This can then be
used and interpreted as desired wherever it is needed.
It is very clear that IPv6's approach to multihoming is infinitely
superior to IPv4 + CIDR's multihoming scheme, and I am glad to see
that even politicians recognize the opportunities that arise as
a result of this wonderful new technology.
Politicians recognising the opportunities, fine so long as they realise
that it is an international issue. Perhaps they should set up a load of
conferences to determine an agreed and unambiguous definition of
'Acceptable' - that should keep them from doing too much damage for a long
time.
Andy