On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 1:48 PM, SM <sm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I am subject to the laws where I am residing. If the government were to decide to implement political or "moral" censorship I doubt that IETF participants would bother about that.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.
On the contrary. Many of us are very committed to preventing those types of censorship and similar political concerns are the reason that the NSA activities have caused such a degree of anger.
Moral censorship is invariably a pretext for concealing abusive behavior. The governments that engage in such censorship have the worst records on human rights, on women's rights, children's rights, lesbian, gay, transgender rights.
Effecting social change requires powerful communications tools. Everyone agrees that pornography is a powerful tool for effecting social change. The only disagreement is over whether the change is positive or not.
The reason for calling this out as a red line is that I believe that negotiations are much more productive when everyone is willing to put their real positions on the table. I am more than willing to work to meet government interests in protecting their access to the net, to prevent the use of the net by thieves and child abusers and on a wide range of issues.
But censorship is the one issue where we are not going to come to agreement. And if they try to impose censorship through political means they will find that they are being defeated through technical means.
IPv7 was discussed within the IETF in 1992.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'.
The point is that a change like that needs to emerge from prior consensus but many application layer developments do not.
At the moment we have an imperfect understanding of which registrations need which type of treatment.
We want people to innovate and use the net creatively. We don't want to stand in people's way.
Registration is better if the person considers it worthwhile to prevent accidental collisions. I don't require anyone to do it. I am aware that there is a well-known case where the collision is by design because of some IETF history ...
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.
There are three approaches to allocating identifiers
1) Registration in a finite name space
(e.g. IP port numbers)
2) Registration in an essentially infinite name space
(e.g. SRV names, DNS names, URIs, OIDs)
3) choosing identifiers at random with a negligible chance of collision)
(e.g. PGP fingerprints, UUIDs)
At present we use approach 1 far too often. It is simple but lazy.
We should insist that application layer protocols support approaches 2 and 3 and that approach 2 should require as little effort as possible to reserve names and prevent collisions.
I will make some more detailed proposals in the apps area later on.
That might work if someone went out there to do the work.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.
Brazil is planning to spend a couple of million dollars on a conference. The set of proposals I describe would cost them considerably less.
People in IETF space are thinking about this process in completely the wrong way. This is not a threat, it is an opportunity. Here we have a group of people who have turned up wanting to do something. They don't write code, they don't write technical specifications. But they are very very good at getting corporations to move in a single direction when they put their minds to it.
Isn't that something we need?
Many governments have improved technical specifications to benefit consumers. The US is actually very poor at this. So I spend $650 for a telephone that is locked to a single carrier in the US but in most of the rest of the world the carriers and the vendors are told that they will be slapped will billion dollar fines and their CEO put in pokey if they engage in that type of anti-competitive behavior.
The reason cell phones have SIM cards in them is because the European and Japanese govts. passed regulations that required them.
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