> From: "Dr. Jeffrey Race" <jrace@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > On Sun, 14 Mar 2004 11:12:12 +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: > >What we need here is a fundamentally different approach: one where > >desired communication is tagged as such explicitly. > > You are right a different approach is needed, but not this one > because it does not admit communication from strangers. That is true in both theory and practice. > The only solution is one which removes from connectivity those > who dump their trash on the commons. This is easy to do. That is true in theory. In practice it has been difficult. I'm not referring to the lies and whines of spammers and address block hijackers. There are big problems getting slumlords to evict tenents that throw their garbage and slops out their tenement windows onto the commons. UUnet is the classic case, with its years of claiming to be unable to act because it is unable to know from which window of which tenement any given stinking mess came (i.e. check RADIUS logs or count SYNs to outside port 25 and decide which of its resellers resold bandwidth to the spammer). When respectable people unilaterally shun all residents of a tenement with many spammers, we are greeted with demands for government and IETF intervention to stop our vigilante terrorism and redress our violation of the fundamental right to a free lunch. It has been suggested that something the IETF could do is define terms. It would help a lot if there were an official term describing the "consumer level" service intended for little more than web browsing, with often AUPs that prohibit "servers," and often with blocks on port 25. People who want real Internet connectivity wouldn't howl when they don't get it after not paying for it. "Consumer level" doesn't quite work for me, since the a "consumer" might want the real thing and a business might not. "No servers" isn't quite right because it's SMTP clients that port 25 filters disable. The IETF needs to admit to itself and the world that the IP addresses assigned to many cable modem and DSL providers are beyond the edges of the Internet where the End to End Principle applies. Whether anyone likes it or not, they are not connected to the Internet. They might answer ICMP echo requests and they're better connected than hosts on the UUCP network were, but hosts on the UUCP network is what they are like. There is a pressing need to admit and publish this fact to forestall governments "saving" the situation. Contrary to the cries of the free lunch crowd, government regulation would try to reduce everyone's connectivity to their pale imitation than to give them the real connectivity they demand. Vernon Schryver vjs@xxxxxxxxxxxx