Dave Crocker wrote:
Tony,
TH> With this type of policy, the operations community is dictating
TH> which applications can be run from specific ranges of IP
addresses.
Does an ISP have a *right* to specify what applications may
be run by their customers?
Not if it simultaneously wants protection from liability for any content
that the customer might be sending. The ISP is either an immune carrier
of content, or in the content management business, not both. The
transport protocol id and everything past it are only really meaningful
to the endpoints, so that qualifies as content. More below.
Well, certainly an ISP has a right to make specifications
concerning consumption of the ISP's resources, and
restrictions of applications might be seen as falling under this.
The lines that were crossed here are guilt-by-association, and the
declaration by one ISP that an entire class of another ISPs customers do
not have the right to run a particular app.
In context, it is clearly the right of a mail server operator to refuse
mail. My concern is more about the precedent where a large ISP decides
that address ranges have particular application semantics.
That said, yes, this is about as dumb as an ISP's rules can
get. Certainly as cynical and possibly as manipulative.
The question is what the IETF can or should do about bad ISP
customer policies, when those policies do not cause
operations problems for the rest of the Internet?
The IETF needs to recognize that the ISPs don't really have a good
alternative, and work on providing one. If they have an alternative and
continue down the path, you are right there is not much the IETF can do.
At the same time, market forces will fix that when customers move to the
ISP that implements the alternative.
d/
ps. When AOL, MSN and Yahoo announced that they were going
to lead an initiative for spam control, it *did* occur to me
that the policies that might be tolerable for their
mass-market customers would be entirely inappropriate and
damaging to the rest of the Internet's user base.
MSN & Yahoo have not (yet?) implemented the address range controls. At
least I am not getting any bounces, while my wife is active on a couple
of Yahoo groups and I can still send mail to my MSN account.
Tony