On Wed, Jun 9, 2021 at 5:22 PM John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
And I have a question: What does this rather long thread
actually have to do with the IETF other than demonstrating that
it would be dumb for our discussions to depend on a providers
who intended to support those discussions by selling
subscriptions and/or tracking user behavior and/or comments?
The reason I tried to bring it back to stuff that is in IETF scope was because I see all of these
issues as being aspects of the same broken approach to Internet accounts.
Traditionally, we view an Internet account as being a thing that it LENT by the service provider
to the user. And the design of DNS reflects this in that DNS is a naming system for hosts and
services, it is not a naming system for people. It is ludicrously expensive for a start, $10/yr for
a DNS name is not actually an unreasonable charge for running DNS authoritative services but
it is an absurd amount for a user name. When WhatsApp was a paid service, it was $1/yr. So
$10/yr for the user name is ridiculous.
I think we need to have a reconsideration of the role of naming and authentication and authorization.
And this is something a lot of service providers need to think through as tales of people losing
all the Amazon digital goods they purchased because their Amazon account was revoked proves.
For me, usernames and authentication are something that should intrinsically belong to the user
and be theirs for life. I don't think people should lose their Internet names under any circumstances.
An Internet name should be just like a traditional common name, just unique to the holder.
Authorization is a different matter, that is something that is entirely in the power of the person who
owns the resource in question. The IETF is an open forum, the Trilateral Commission is not, The
Work is not, The Oxford Union Society is not. There are times when it is fun to participate in a
completely open forum and there are times when you don't want to hear yet more stupidity from the
woman claiming that vaccination causes people to become magnetized.
Every one of the HVAC systems in my house is close to a wired ethernet drop. The system I am
planning to move to would connect the furnaces and the AC units directly to the net and these would
then in turn take temperatures from multiple sense points in the house for control purposes. A smart
furnace makes infinitely more sense than a smart thermostat connected to a furnace so stupid that it
can't tell me when it is over pressure, when filters need replacing, etc. etc.
The reason we have smart thermostats and stupid furnaces is path dependence. And we are stuck with
the Internet account provider model for the same reason.
