On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 1:48 PM, SM <sm(_at_)resistor(_dot_)net> wrote:
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.
I am subject to the laws where I am residing. If the government were to
decide to implement political or "moral" censorship I doubt that IETF
participants would bother about that.
On the contrary. Many of us are very committed to preventing those types of
censorship and similar political concerns are the reason that the NSA
activities have caused such a degree of anger.
Moral censorship is invariably a pretext for concealing abusive behavior.
The governments that engage in such censorship have the worst records on
human rights, on women's rights, children's rights, lesbian, gay,
transgender rights.
Effecting social change requires powerful communications tools. Everyone
agrees that pornography is a powerful tool for effecting social change. The
only disagreement is over whether the change is positive or not.
The reason for calling this out as a red line is that I believe that
negotiations are much more productive when everyone is willing to put their
real positions on the table. I am more than willing to work to meet
government interests in protecting their access to the net, to prevent the
use of the net by thieves and child abusers and on a wide range of issues.
But censorship is the one issue where we are not going to come to
agreement. And if they try to impose censorship through political means
they will find that they are being defeated through technical means.
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'.
IPv7 was discussed within the IETF in 1992.
The point is that a change like that needs to emerge from prior consensus
but many application layer developments do not.
At the moment we have an imperfect understanding of which registrations
need which type of treatment.
We want people to innovate and use the net creatively. We don't want to
stand in people's way.
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.
Registration is better if the person considers it worthwhile to prevent
accidental collisions. I don't require anyone to do it. I am aware that
there is a well-known case where the collision is by design because of some
IETF history ...
There are three approaches to allocating identifiers
1) Registration in a finite name space
(e.g. IP port numbers)
2) Registration in an essentially infinite name space
(e.g. SRV names, DNS names, URIs, OIDs)
3) choosing identifiers at random with a negligible chance of collision)
(e.g. PGP fingerprints, UUIDs)
At present we use approach 1 far too often. It is simple but lazy.
We should insist that application layer protocols support approaches 2 and
3 and that approach 2 should require as little effort as possible to
reserve names and prevent collisions.
I will make some more detailed proposals in the apps area later on.
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.
That might work if someone went out there to do the work.
Brazil is planning to spend a couple of million dollars on a conference.
The set of proposals I describe would cost them considerably less.
People in IETF space are thinking about this process in completely the
wrong way. This is not a threat, it is an opportunity. Here we have a group
of people who have turned up wanting to do something. They don't write
code, they don't write technical specifications. But they are very very
good at getting corporations to move in a single direction when they put
their minds to it.
Isn't that something we need?
Many governments have improved technical specifications to benefit
consumers. The US is actually very poor at this. So I spend $650 for a
telephone that is locked to a single carrier in the US but in most of the
rest of the world the carriers and the vendors are told that they will be
slapped will billion dollar fines and their CEO put in pokey if they engage
in that type of anti-competitive behavior.
The reason cell phones have SIM cards in them is because the European and
Japanese govts. passed regulations that required them.
--
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