Re: [alto] Adopting two I-Ds as WG documents

In the draft problem statement is the following paragraph on caching:  

"2. Content awareness:  Since caches need to store the content being
delivered, they are subject to legal issues whenever the user does not
have the right to access or distribute such content.  This limitation
makes caching approaches that do not (or cannot) support digital rights
management unusable for distributing copyrighted material.  Since, it is
very difficult for an abstract file sharing proxy to know all of the
legal parameters around distributing content, this makes caching
unusable for many file-sharing systems.  Since this is a legal and not
technical issue, the solution would be at the legal, not network,
layer."

Nothing prevents a cache from receiving a black list of hashes and then
not caching those items.  This of course avoids the acceleration of
illicit content -- the root cause of network congestion today.

In contrast to the current draft's assertion, caching can be supportive
of both traditional DRM (i.e., encrypted files) and legal enforcement
activities.  It *is* a technical issue.

There is also a certain strangeness in the section on Security
Considerations where the authors, among other things, hypothesize about
rogue ISPs: "...in cases where the ALTO service provider maliciously
alters results returned by queries after ALTO has gained popularity..."

More important is the fact that the authors' fail to address the
fundamental issue of content security (i.e., copyrights) that
contributes to a situation that many find undesirable, indefensible and
inexcusable.  Consider recent observations from Eric Schmidt (Google)
and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.  

Mr. Schmidt noted that the Internet is fast becoming a "cesspool."  "Let
me just say precisely, it's a sewer out there." [Advertising Age, April
7, 2009] 

Sir Andrew's description to the House of Lords was similar: "The
internet is a Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy." [Media Guardian
April 3, 2009]

Contrary to the current draft, the issue isn't the potential for a
wayward ISP to harm an innocent P2P application (or its unblemished
user).  Rather, it's the need for all applications to abide by some
agreed-upon rules of the road.  Respect for the property of others is
one such rule we'd be wise to honor.  

Doing so would begin to clean up the mess we've allowed to accumulate
and fester.

-----Original Message-----
From: alto-bounces@ietf.org [mailto:alto-bounces@ietf.org] On Behalf Of
Vijay K. Gurbani
Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2009 10:04 AM
To: alto
Subject: [alto] Adopting two I-Ds as WG documents

Folks: To ratify the consensus during the IETF 74 meeting in
SF, we will be adopting two documents as WG deliverables:

1) draft-marocco-alto-problem-statement-05 will be adopted
as the deliverable for the "problem statement" charter item.
A new -00 WG version will be submitted by the editors shortly,
and we will proceed to WGLC after that.

2) draft-kiesel-alto-reqs-02 will be adopted as the deliverable
for the "requirements document."  A new -00 WG version will
be submitted by the editors shortly.  This draft will remain
"alive" for a while as other issues (protocol, discovery, etc.)
are worked on.  The editors will -- in a symbiotic relationship --
track the emerging consensus  on these issues as well as contribute
to these issues and update the requirements draft as consensus
emerges.

Please post on the list if there is any objection to moving the
above two drafts ahead.

Thanks.

- vijay (on behalf of Jon and Enrico)
-- 
Vijay K. Gurbani, Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent
1960 Lucent Lane, Rm. 9C-533, Naperville, Illinois 60566 (USA)
Email: vkg@{alcatel-lucent.com,bell-labs.com,acm.org}
Web:   http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/vkg/
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