Dave Crocker wrote: > Tony, > > TH> With this type of policy, the operations community is dictating > TH> which applications can be run from specific ranges of IP > addresses. > > Does an ISP have a *right* to specify what applications may > be run by their customers? Not if it simultaneously wants protection from liability for any content that the customer might be sending. The ISP is either an immune carrier of content, or in the content management business, not both. The transport protocol id and everything past it are only really meaningful to the endpoints, so that qualifies as content. More below. > > Well, certainly an ISP has a right to make specifications > concerning consumption of the ISP's resources, and > restrictions of applications might be seen as falling under this. The lines that were crossed here are guilt-by-association, and the declaration by one ISP that an entire class of another ISPs customers do not have the right to run a particular app. In context, it is clearly the right of a mail server operator to refuse mail. My concern is more about the precedent where a large ISP decides that address ranges have particular application semantics. > > That said, yes, this is about as dumb as an ISP's rules can > get. Certainly as cynical and possibly as manipulative. > > The question is what the IETF can or should do about bad ISP > customer policies, when those policies do not cause > operations problems for the rest of the Internet? > The IETF needs to recognize that the ISPs don't really have a good alternative, and work on providing one. If they have an alternative and continue down the path, you are right there is not much the IETF can do. At the same time, market forces will fix that when customers move to the ISP that implements the alternative. > > > d/ > > ps. When AOL, MSN and Yahoo announced that they were going > to lead an initiative for spam control, it *did* occur to me > that the policies that might be tolerable for their > mass-market customers would be entirely inappropriate and > damaging to the rest of the Internet's user base. MSN & Yahoo have not (yet?) implemented the address range controls. At least I am not getting any bounces, while my wife is active on a couple of Yahoo groups and I can still send mail to my MSN account. Tony