Apology Re: Principles of Spam-abatement

As he so often does, I think Dave has put his finger on the nature of 
the problem with which we are failing to make progress:
On Mar 12, 2004, at 9:36 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:

> NB> some of us want to discuss it in terms of property rights, and 
> others
> NB> of us want to discuss it in terms of human rights.
>
> Unfortunately, the IETF mailing list is not a very good venue for 
> either
> topic, because most of the folks on the IETF mailing list have no
> qualifications or special insight into these difficult issues.
This is exactly right -- we have people arguing from two different 
paradigms, both fundamentally orthogonal to the expertise of the IETF.  
What this suggests to me is that until the larger society -- i.e. the 
courts and international institutions -- reach a determination of the 
"right" paradigm for dealing with spam, the IETF is going to spin its 
wheels on these issues.  If someone could tell us definitively "this is 
a question of property rights" or "this is a question of human rights" 
or whatever, the IETF as a community would be well qualified to do the 
engineering implied by that conclusion.  Until then, it's probably an 
unresolvable issue for a community as open and democratic as the IETF.
But most of us recognize that spam needs to be attacked on several 
fronts.  We can and should focus IETF efforts on getting as many 
not-overly-controversial approaches to spam control to work together, 
and declare "out of IETF scope" those efforts that are the subject of 
ongoing paradigmatic debates at the political layer.  That doesn't mean 
that people like Paul and Vernon can't work on property-based 
approaches, nor that others of us can't work on approaches that 
consider the universal ability to communicate as a higher-priority 
requirement, but merely that the IETF as a body should probably avoid 
both of those families of solutions, pending a broader societal 
consensus.  (When Paul started quoting John Locke, I was very tempted 
-- not being a big Locke fan, to say the least --  to start quoting 
several other philosophers, and that's when the the lightbulb finally 
went off in my head, a realization that this was not an IETF discussion 
anymore.  Paul and I can debate philosophy on our own time, and I look 
forward to it.)  Perhaps the rule of thumb is that if the discussion of 
a topic repeatedly deteriorates into arguments about the philosophical 
underpinnings of civil society, it's not a suitable topic for the IETF?
The question that remains for IETF is this one:  what can we -- 
including people like Paul and me who are mutually friendly and 
respectful, but philosophically from opposite ends of the Earth -- do 
together *constructively* about spam?
For my part, I think we as an engineering community can make a lot of 
progress on the less-philosophically-controversial stuff that won't 
solve the whole spam problem, but that support both of our approaches 
-- not only the DNS-based approaches being discussed in ietf-mxcomp, 
but also, I suspect, a whole lot of other things (e.g., standardized 
headers to let challenge/response work better with mailing lists, 
protocols for sharing data for collaborative spam filtering, 
standardized SMTP extensions for cryptographic challenge/response 
(which this morning's BBC broadcast described as a new Microsoft 
invention!), and perhaps even improved tracing/accountability tools for 
law enforcement.)
Anyway, in closing I apologize to the entire IETF community for taking 
so long to realize that some of my technical arguments have been 
founded upon basic philosophical assumptions which are not universally 
shared.  Perhaps if we can all try to make this separation we will 
begin to make more progress.  -- Nathaniel