On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 11:35 AM, SM <sm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi John, Jorge,
At 06:19 21-11-2013, John Curran wrote:
I do not have an opinion about the globalization of ICANN. In my opinion the IETF protocol parameter registry topic is an IETF matter.
I disagree.
Everyone has the right to:
1) Connect hosts to the Internet.
2) Make use of any existing Internet application protocol.
3) Develop new application protocols.
Governments do have the duty to police the Internet to prevent behavior that is legitimately criminal. But that does not include political or 'moral' censorship.
Companies that provide access have the right to recoup costs but not to collect monopoly rents.
The distinction between application protocols and other protocols is important. Innovation and diversity in application layer protocols is productive. Diversity at lower layers in the Internet stack is usually counter-productive at best.
The IETF protocol registries do not recognize this distinction at present and many application layer registries are subject to more control than is necessary. The Internet will break if multiple parties attempt to deploy incompatible protocols identifying themselves as 'ipv7'.
There is an IETF interest in controlling the parts of the IANA registry that allocate numbers for the low level Internet infrastructure. But it should be easier to add application protocols and these should not require IETF permission or even registration unless a 'friendly name' for the protocol is desired and thus a registration mechanism is necessary to prevent accidental collision.
This is an area where the IETF reserved port number scheme collapsed long ago. The government and civil society interests should ask IETF to provide an application discovery mechanism that does not rely on IANA/IETF control.
I am aware that there has been calls for globalization of the IANA function. Internet fragmentation at the national level can mean many things. I am not aware of any discussions about that within an IETF context. There has been some discussion about one or more countries spying on Internet traffic.
It is doubtful whether transition to IPv6 remains a top priority given the uninspiring results. There has been some related discussion within an IETF context (see transition thread on this mailing list).
This is where governments can impact change.
The problem with IPv6 deployment is that there are transition costs. Until very recently the IETF plan for deployment was to try to make IPv6 more attractive than IPv4 by deliberately hobbling IPv4 features and resist palliative measures such as NAT. This was a complete feature.
Now we have over a dozen transition proposals and no clear market choice. And the market is not going to make a choice because the market stakeholders find NAT works well enough for its needs.
What I would do as a government entity is to get a group of techies to describe a minimum set of technical capabilities for Internet access points. The market can decide colour, shape, size, whether the device supports WiFi or not. But the box should be capable of:
1) Sitting on an IPv4 or an IPv6 network connection plus a defined IPv4 gateway scheme and provide full Internet service to either IPv4 or IPv6 addresses.
2) Rate limiting SYN requests so as to prevent the DDoS attacks from the network being passed onto the Internet. (No home network needs to create more than a million TCP/IP channels an hour.)
3) Blocking outbound packets with forced source addresses.
4) Support Port Control Protocol.
5) Passing all necessary DNS records to perform DNSSEC (provided the root of trust issues are solved).
We could achieve the necessary pre-conditions for transition if just one large government told ISPs that they planned to require connection boxes to support such features. Once the manufacturers of the boxes had a clear direction, they would have no reason not to provide the same feature set in other jurisdictions.
Website: http://hallambaker.com/