I suggest that those who wish to more fully understand all this trust stuff might find it useful to look at http://mcg.org.br/. Cheers...\Stef At 6:24 +0000 5/29/03, Paul Vixie wrote: >john-ietf@jck.com (John C Klensin) writes: > > > ..., as soon as one institutes either charging schemes or collections of > > bilateral agreements, there are huge incentives to created "hub systems" > > or "carriers" -- entities whose business it is to make agreements with > > lots of local providers/servers (whom they will come to call "customers") > > and bilateral agreements with each other. Without that, everyone who > > wants to run a mail server has to either establish bilateral agreements > > with everyone else, or a regulatory regime becomes necessary to make the > > sequential settlement arrangements work. Economies of scale, if only in > > agreement-making, imply few enough, and large enough, carriers for > > governments to start taking interest on a "competition" or "anti-trust" > > or "consumer protection" basis. Sorry to be pessimistic about this, but > > I think it quickly takes us where we don't want to go. > > > > Quoting Stef, "be careful what you wish for..." > >i'm not worried about this. in fact, i'm *counting* on the existence of a >new class of businesses which i call "trust providers" or "trust brokers" >whose only claim to revenue is when they act as a trusted trust aggregator >so that i don't have to attend key signing parties in order to be able to >confidently accept mail based on reasonable certainty of the relay's intent, >the identity of the sender, and the value (to the sender) of the receipt. > >will it be abused? you betcha. two ways off the top of my head. first, >as jck says above, there's a lot of antitrust concern if for example verisign >decided to "trust-peer" with yahoo and noone else, and yahoo did likewise, >in hopes that the two of them could "pull a uunet" in terms of making everyone >else in the world their customer before a more diverse market can become >established. fortunately we have the sherman act in the usa and similar >things elsewhere, so, unless microsoft itself decided to play, we're safe. > >second, will be a class of trustbrokers who will try very hard to blur the >distinctions as to exactly what they are "promising about", so as to feed >you "gray spam" and reap both the transactional rewards associated with the >work AND kickbacks and bribes from the senders of the gray spam. these folks >will have to be put out of business the old fashioned way, by poison reverse. >that is, a large number of consumers and other trustbrokers will have to >declare "gray promises" to have negative value, thus rendering them worthless. > >all this goes to show is that there is no silver bullet, no one size fits all, >no magic pill or potion. as long as we fit breitbart's "can be reached by >an ip packet from" notation, then we'll have the lower end of the humanity >scale nibbling at our resources, trying to take something and give nothing, >and so on. however, even though unsolicited fax is dead, consider the >telemarketing field. when my phone rings, there's a better than even chance >that it isn't a telemarketer. it's not 100% but it's better than even. if >we could get that for an ibcs that replaced smtp, i'd be singing in the aisles. > >by the way mr. deutsch, there is no reference work available. i've waved my >arms about this stuff and described it to no less than 1.5 dozen people in >the last six years, at varying levels of bakedness, but i don't want to have >to do the work myself and i met have no success in getting anybody else to >take it on. therefore there's no formal design, not even a list of criteria, >and nothing's been wrote up, and there's no wheel for you to duplicate, so you >have a clear field and i encourage you to take advantage of the fact that the >rest of the world thinks this is just crackpot stupidity on the march. please >put me on your friends and family list if you squeeze an IPO out of it, though. >-- >Paul Vixie