Re: [hrpc] "Paul Vixie and Peter Lowe on Why DoH is Politically Motivated"

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 11:36 AM Vittorio Bertola <vittorio.bertola=
[e-mail]> wrote:

> That's exactly why the difference between DoT and DoH is political way
> more than technical: I trust you that both may be used in ways that make
> them hard to block, but for DoT it is an unintended consequence, while for
> DoH it is an intended objective of the designers, stated in the
> specification itself and in several public statements.
>
> And this is a great illustration of the good reason why we talk about
political versus technical in the IETF: because if we consider only the
political and not the technical, we can wander off into the weeds doing
things that don't matter.

In this case, you're drawing a distinction of intent, but what matters is
the effect of the protocol, not what was intended. As an example, we've
seen a few people assert that DoH is bad because it makes it possible to
bypass the local resolver in a way that is difficult to detect (which is
actually debatable). But in fact it's trivial without the DoH protocol to
do the same thing—it's just not standardized. So the difference between DoH
and this non-standard protocol that I speculate might exist is merely that
one is documented and the other isn't.

So if we imagine that we are somehow protected when we don't document the
protocol, we are whistling past the graveyard. This is the important
distinction that we lose when we reduce this to a political discussion, and
it's the reason we shouldn't.