Re: [Add] Browser Administrative Authority

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

Hi Glenn,

On 24/05/2019 15:48, Deen, Glenn (NBCUniversal) wrote:
> HI everyone,
> 
> I’ve been thinking though some of the issues with the proposal DoH
> deployment in browsers.
>  
> A big part of the tug of war here is  the authority precedence for
> advanced security and network settings that should be followed.
> 
> Historically, it’s been at the device level – which meant the device
> administrator, which could choose delegate choices to a specific DNS
> resolver operator, or to the Network DHCP provided settings.

(Some) VPNs don't match that history. There are probably other
examples but those never caused such debate. Main thing is I
don't think we can ignore the issue that the scale of the
potential (not yet actual) change is part of what's causing
angst, and not just the functional/architectural/control change.
I think that means that attempts such as yours (which is fair,
though I'd quibble a bit about some details) to analyse this
functionally are naturally likely to devolve back down to
the kind of well-meant whataboutery [1] that we've seen
before and are starting to see repeated in this thread.

Secondly, while I'd love to see OSes offer new APIs so that
applications could e.g. tell if DoT is in use, ISTM that we
can't expect that application developers who want better
DNS privacy will hold off on use of DoH and wait for such
APIs to be offered across the various platforms about which
they care. So I'm not sure there's a viable approach that
largely preserves the status-quo wrt controls over DNS even
though it'd be a great thing if OSes were providing such
APIs to applications. I think that means that this debate
can't really end up at the status-quo if applications do
want to use our DNS privacy mechanisms. That doesn't mean
we end up with your "new" hierarchy but it may mean that we
have to accept that the "old" hierarchy is going to be
changed for sure and that there's little point in trying to
fully maintain that.

Cheers,
S.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whataboutery