Re: [Add] What to do in this potential working group

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

Ekr,

I fully realise that there will be differences of viewpoints when it comes to the trustworthiness of individual DNS service providers.

But I was trying to make a different point. While we may disagree which provider I’d like to use for the DNS service, I think it would be quite reasonable for us to agree that if all of us put our all our queries in one place (whatever that is) that this causes severe problems:

- That place becomes immensely valuable from a commercial data mining perspective. There’s a risk that it will at least at some point be used for data mining, despite whatever the intentions of the people who set this system up now is.

- That place becomes immensely interesting to for governments to tap. There’s a risk that this tapping is either already happening or will be happening going forward, despite best intentions of the people who set it up or who manage it.

- That places becomes critical infrastructure and a weak point that we do not need in the Internet.

As a result, I would like to suggest that the IETF actually concludes the above and recommends against this practice.

For whatever it is worth, I can understand some motivations for doing something like this e.g. in browsers. Some good reasons and potentially also some not so good reasons. But even with that background, it is difficult for me to imagine a worse act for the Internet than making browsers call home for every action of the user. The privacy impacts for the users are unimaginably bad.

A few years ago we realised that surveillance organisations were looking at people's traffic, and we managed to change the Internet to protect this traffic with cryptographic means. I think it is to think about the next step, and ensure that we don’t create an Internet architecture that puts everyone’s data at central location.

Obviously, encrypted DNS is still hugely important, as are global DNS services. However, the deployment model of using one (or a small number of) providers is just wrong. That would be fixable.

Jari