Re: [arch-d] possible new IAB programme on Internet resilience

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 27-Dec-19 23:29, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 11:24:23AM +0000,
>  Andrew Campling <[e-mail]> wrote 
>  a message of 38 lines which said:
> 
>> I wonder whether a wider discussion needs to take place about
>> resilience and related topics like centralisation and consolidation.
>> To do this properly it really needs the involvement of a much more
>> diverse set of stakeholders and really needs to address both policy
>> and technical considerations as just doing the latter in isolation
>> will not really get to the core issues.  I think that a debate led
>> by a body like the IGF but with input when appropriate on technical
>> considerations by the IAB/IETF would be a much more useful exercise
>> than something focused purely within the IAB/IETF.
> 
> I think I disagree. Theoretically, you're right, resilience and
> robustness do not depend only on technical issues. (For instance, DNS
> filtering for politically-motivated censorship certainly makes the DNS
> more brittle and therefore decreases the Internet's robustness.)
> 
> But, in practice, I'm very pessimistic about the possibility of a
> serious work on these subjects in another place. At least in the
> IAB/IETF, we can do concrete and productive work, even if limited in
> scope. 

I'd go a bit further. IMHO, the IETF (+IAB) does best by explicitly
excluding political, economic or sociological issues from our
reasoning *even if they seem relevant*. RFC 1984, 2804 and 7258 are
good examples of documents that stick to technical arguments in the
face of a great temptation to "go political". For the resilience
(or robustness) discussion, we should do the same.

For example, fragmentation of the DNS name space is damage, regardless
of the cause. Making the name space intrinsically self-healing
would therefore be a good thing.

> Otherwise, I don't see a forum where efficient things could be
> done. Certainly not ICANN, and even less so IGF, which is a very good
> example of useless chat.
> 
> [This is obviously related to the discussion about 
> draft-iab-for-the-users.]

I agree. I think it is absolutely correct to state that the technical
end goal is better services for users, rather than convenience for
operators, but absolutely unnnecessary to rhapsodise about the the
social good. (This has nothing to do with my opinions about the social
good. It's about how the IETF, as a trans-national group, can produce
effective documents.)

    Brian