On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 11:35 AM, SM <sm(_at_)resistor(_dot_)net> wrote:
Hi John, Jorge,
At 06:19 21-11-2013, John Curran wrote:
I do not have an opinion about the globalization of ICANN. In my opinion
the IETF protocol parameter registry topic is an IETF matter.
I disagree.
Everyone has the right to:
1) Connect hosts to the Internet.
2) Make use of any existing Internet application protocol.
3) Develop new application protocols.
Governments do have the duty to police the Internet to prevent behavior
that is legitimately criminal. But that does not include political or
'moral' censorship.
Companies that provide access have the right to recoup costs but not to
collect monopoly rents.
The distinction between application protocols and other protocols is
important. Innovation and diversity in application layer protocols is
productive. Diversity at lower layers in the Internet stack is usually
counter-productive at best.
The IETF protocol registries do not recognize this distinction at present
and many application layer registries are subject to more control than is
necessary. The Internet will break if multiple parties attempt to deploy
incompatible protocols identifying themselves as 'ipv7'.
There is an IETF interest in controlling the parts of the IANA registry
that allocate numbers for the low level Internet infrastructure. But it
should be easier to add application protocols and these should not require
IETF permission or even registration unless a 'friendly name' for the
protocol is desired and thus a registration mechanism is necessary to
prevent accidental collision.
This is an area where the IETF reserved port number scheme collapsed long
ago. The government and civil society interests should ask IETF to provide
an application discovery mechanism that does not rely on IANA/IETF control.
I am aware that there has been calls for globalization of the IANA
function. Internet fragmentation at the national level can mean many
things. I am not aware of any discussions about that within an IETF
context. There has been some discussion about one or more countries spying
on Internet traffic.
It is doubtful whether transition to IPv6 remains a top priority given the
uninspiring results. There has been some related discussion within an IETF
context (see transition thread on this mailing list).
This is where governments can impact change.
The problem with IPv6 deployment is that there are transition costs. Until
very recently the IETF plan for deployment was to try to make IPv6 more
attractive than IPv4 by deliberately hobbling IPv4 features and resist
palliative measures such as NAT. This was a complete feature.
Now we have over a dozen transition proposals and no clear market choice.
And the market is not going to make a choice because the market
stakeholders find NAT works well enough for its needs.
What I would do as a government entity is to get a group of techies to
describe a minimum set of technical capabilities for Internet access
points. The market can decide colour, shape, size, whether the device
supports WiFi or not. But the box should be capable of:
1) Sitting on an IPv4 or an IPv6 network connection plus a defined IPv4
gateway scheme and provide full Internet service to either IPv4 or IPv6
addresses.
2) Rate limiting SYN requests so as to prevent the DDoS attacks from the
network being passed onto the Internet. (No home network needs to create
more than a million TCP/IP channels an hour.)
3) Blocking outbound packets with forced source addresses.
4) Support Port Control Protocol.
5) Passing all necessary DNS records to perform DNSSEC (provided the root
of trust issues are solved).
We could achieve the necessary pre-conditions for transition if just one
large government told ISPs that they planned to require connection boxes to
support such features. Once the manufacturers of the boxes had a clear
direction, they would have no reason not to provide the same feature set in
other jurisdictions.
--
Website: http://hallambaker.com/