Re: [Din] Updated charter proposal

[David Mazieres <[e-mail]>]

Melinda Shore <[e-mail]> writes:

> Hi, all:
>
> We've updated the proposed charter based on discussions we've
> had with participants over the past several weeks, and we're
> looking for additional feedback.  Please take a look and send
> comments to the mailing list.  As I think most of you know,
> proposed research groups may meet for a year before a decision
> is made to charter them, or not, and we will be at the one-year
> mark in Montreal.  We want to make sure the charter text
> reflects the direction we'd like to take and the work we'd
> intend to undertake once chartered.
>
> The current draft is at:
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/17V6dAawxdda_oiul3p1ssRDYSlHFOe9CnXn-4iLTCdI/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for the work you put into this.  A few comments:

        The focus of DINRG is on infrastructure services that can
        benefit from decentralization or that are difficult to realize
        in local, potentially connectivity-constrained networks.

Some of the naming and trust issues would seem to fall under this focus
only indirectly.  Yes, they are difficult to realize locally because you
don't fully trust any local environment.  But as read, it sounds like
the main limitation of local is that it's potentially connectivity
constrained, while that is only one of several issued.

        Some of the increase in centralization is due to business
        models that rely on centralized accounting and administration,
        but there are also cases where centralization is the result of
        hierarchical trust models which rely on "trusted third
        parties.".

But isn't a big hypothesis here that some of the increase is due neither
to business models nor to inherent hierarchical trust, but rather just
to missing infrastructure?  A kind of dumb but hugely impactful example
would be the use of cloud services where you don't need huge data or
aggregation over many users, but just because NAT traversal and dynamic
IP addresses are a pain.  An example closer to the working group would
be HSTS preload lists maintained in a centralized fashion by the browser
vendors, simply because there's not a good Internet infrastructure for
web site operators to construct these lists in a decentralized fashion.

        regular several physical meetings per year.

Probably mean "several regular"

David