Re: [Add] Proposed charter and BoF request for IETF 106

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

Il 9 ottobre 2019 16:21 Richard Barnes <[e-mail]> ha scritto:

I think EKR is on the right track here. 

There is a bright line here between technology and deployment policy.  The former we have some hope of progressing on, and there are meaty questions around how applications can discover local network capabilities and preferences in a way that is not open to abuse like the mechanisms we have today.  On questions of the latter form, the entire history of this list, and the meeting that preceded it demonstrate, that there is very little hope of consensus. 

The charter right now has some of both.  If this charter is to go forward, it should be refactored to focus on engineering questions, and avoid policy questions.  In particular, the BCP item needs to be struck.

I see the reasons behind this line of thought, but honestly, seen from my viewpoint, it looks like the IETF is playing hide and seek on the non-technical issues. It starts a deep change in a basic technology for the entire Internet, with at least one AD stating in public things like "we're going to save dissidents and journalists with this new technology", then when the real world problems of that approach come up, the IETF backs away and says "sorry, we only deal with the engineering questions". So yes, you can strike any policy and deployment model discussion from the charter, but then you should also strike RFC 7258 - what is it, if not a policy statement?

(Before someone jumps at my throat, I'll stress that I'm not actually arguing against RFC 7258, I'm just noting that it's too late to claim that the IETF does not do policy, at least in this area.)

This said, I do not have a firm opinion yet on this; I see that having the deployment model in the charter might derail technical developments that could instead get to consensus. So it might still be a wise decision for the IETF to say "we have realized that there are complex policy and juridical issues stemming from this and we are not well equipped to deal with them, so we declare them out of scope".

The unavoidable consequence, however, would be that the policy discussion moves somewhere else, possibly somewhere in the I* galaxy, for the global, non-binding and opinion-making debates, and into national Parliaments for any hard law if required. So the IETF must then be prepared to accept that other parts of the ecosystem might have other views on how the DNS should work and which use cases it should support, and cooperate with their conclusions.

And to be honest, even if the IETF decided to tackle the policy issues and managed to come up with a best practice, it could easily be that other policymaking entities got to different conclusions and asked the engineers to align.

--

Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[e-mail] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy