I got the following stuff in response to a mail I sent to the IETF list.
Since I have no idea whether this is an email harvester or a "legitimate"
antispam tool (the form gave no indication, and no links to more
information about its owner), I don't have enough information to decide
reliably to respond to the message.
This posted here in the hope that someone will recognize the username and
tell him/her/it that not getting mail doesn't mean nobody tried to send
any..... and for the usual entertaining/sarcastic/depressing comments about
the side-effect costs of antispam tools, of course.
Harald
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: 18. februar 2004 14:27 -0600
From: inanbe(_at_)xs4all(_dot_)nl
To: harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no
Subject: Re: Re: Continuing the story - another stab at an IETF mission
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Your Returned Message:
--On 18. februar 2004 18:06 +0000 Tom Petch
<nwnetworks(_at_)dial(_dot_)pipex(_dot_)com>
wrote:
I find your definition of the Internet delightfully ambiguous. I was
taught that the Internet (as opposed to an internet or the internet) was
the public network accessible through public IPv4 addresses (this predates
IPv6) ie the Internet ceased at a firewall or other such IP level gateway.
I certainly agree on the "ambiguous", but not with the "delightful" :-)
Reading your definition, I cannot tell where you stand; are firewalls and
networks behind them included in IETF mission or not?
Here, I feel that I stand firmly on the quicksand left by those who have
gone before... if you read Dave Crocker's 1995 RFC 'To be "on" the
Internet' (RFC 1775), you will see that the problem is not a new one.
Luckily for us, "mediated access" and "messaging access" are mostly things
of the past - but in my opinion, the Internet extends to the applications
run by the people who have "client access" to the Internet.
After all, the Internet model is an end-to-end service; if the Internet
stopped at the gateway/NAT box/firewall, it would be an end-to-firewall
service for >90% of today's Internet traffic - and that doesn't make sense
to me.
So in my opinion, firewalls and the networks behind them are part of the
Internet, because we have to design for the Internet that is there, even as
we labor to make it more like the Internet we want to have.
(now, is that sufficient straddling of the NAT debate? :-)
Harald
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