On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 1:02 AM, Eliot Lear <lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
Hi,
On 1/6/14 11:45 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
On 01/06/2014 08:51 PM, John Curran wrote:
What happens when the IETF makes a decision that particular "public
policy" requirements
are _to be considered_ (perpass), or specifically _not to be
considered_ (RFC 2804) in protocol
development?
I think that's a mis-characterisation. IMO both of those are cases
where there are sound technical reasons for the IETF to do, or not
do, work. Yes, those have impacts, but the public policy angle (if
that's the right term) is a side-effect and is not the reason for
the decision.
Why do we state that confidentiality is important to pursue in our
protocols? That is a political decision made by the community. We then
layer on top of that decision technical requirements. IMHO it's a very
important and good political decision. We struggle with such decisions
all the time. That there is a single root is both a technical AND a
political decision. ICANN wouldn't be quite the political focal point
if there were a reasonable technical approach that scaled to the size of
the Internet that allowed for multiple roots. As a community we know
this and have accepted it.
It isn't the single technical root that creates the political focal point,
that would be quite easy to fix.
It is the uniform namespace that creates the political focal point, the
fact that a label has to resolve to the same resource in every part of the
net. That issue is then compounded by the entirely unnecessary and
unfortunate decision to introduce hierarchy at the root level. The problems
would have been much less if the only TLD was .com. That is, no CC TLDs, no
.NET, no .org, everything in one big bucket with the only hierarchy being
at the network level.
That pervasive surveillance can be used for good or bad reduces the
political element in as much as we're not saying any particular use is
good or bad. That as a matter of IETF policy we may view it on the
whole as a bad thing is itself a political decision because it is
fundamentally tied to confidentiality and privacy (which is even more a
political area than confidentiality).
The problem isn't 'politics'. The problem is the degree of specificity in
the decisions made.
The IETF is not deciding whether there will be passive surveillance in one
country but not another. All the IETF can do is to provide tools that
empower individuals to protect their own privacy and to empower providers
to protect the privacy of customers.
That is very different from the decision as to whether Muggins should have
their registrar affiliation withdrawn because Boggins claims that they are
a dirty filthy spammer.
There is a political element to all the work but the decisions to do with
IP address and BGP AS numbers and DNS numbers are very different in
character from the type of decisions IETF makes.
--
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