From: "Dr. Jeffrey Race" <jrace(_at_)attglobal(_dot_)net>
On Sun, 14 Mar 2004 11:12:12 +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
What we need here is a fundamentally different approach: one where
desired communication is tagged as such explicitly.
You are right a different approach is needed, but not this one
because it does not admit communication from strangers.
That is true in both theory and practice.
The only solution is one which removes from connectivity those
who dump their trash on the commons. This is easy to do.
That is true in theory. In practice it has been difficult. I'm not
referring to the lies and whines of spammers and address block hijackers.
There are big problems getting slumlords to evict tenents that throw
their garbage and slops out their tenement windows onto the commons.
UUnet is the classic case, with its years of claiming to be unable to
act because it is unable to know from which window of which tenement
any given stinking mess came (i.e. check RADIUS logs or count SYNs to
outside port 25 and decide which of its resellers resold bandwidth to
the spammer). When respectable people unilaterally shun all residents
of a tenement with many spammers, we are greeted with demands for
government and IETF intervention to stop our vigilante terrorism and
redress our violation of the fundamental right to a free lunch.
It has been suggested that something the IETF could do is define terms.
It would help a lot if there were an official term describing the
"consumer level" service intended for little more than web browsing,
with often AUPs that prohibit "servers," and often with blocks on port
25. People who want real Internet connectivity wouldn't howl when
they don't get it after not paying for it. "Consumer level" doesn't
quite work for me, since the a "consumer" might want the real thing
and a business might not. "No servers" isn't quite right because it's
SMTP clients that port 25 filters disable.
The IETF needs to admit to itself and the world that the IP addresses
assigned to many cable modem and DSL providers are beyond the edges
of the Internet where the End to End Principle applies. Whether anyone
likes it or not, they are not connected to the Internet. They might
answer ICMP echo requests and they're better connected than hosts on
the UUCP network were, but hosts on the UUCP network is what they are
like. There is a pressing need to admit and publish this fact to
forestall governments "saving" the situation. Contrary to the cries
of the free lunch crowd, government regulation would try to reduce
everyone's connectivity to their pale imitation than to give them the
real connectivity they demand.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com