Considering RFC7725bis

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

WG participants,

RFC7725, "An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles" has seen some deployment in the ~4 years since its publication, including by some platforms who use it to indicate that various legal demands have been made of them.

About two years later, we discussed adopting draft-sahib-251-new-protocol-elements. There wasn't substantial interest in the WG, but enough in the broader community for it to be AD-sponsored.

  https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sahib-451-new-protocol-elements-03

For whatever reason, it never got out of AD-sponsorship, and our current AD has asked what we'd like to do about it.

Tommy and I believe that if this document is to proceed, it should be in the HTTP WG, not AD-sponsored. We're also inclined to think that if there's support, the best path forward would be to do a (relatively small) 7725bis; besides the issues that draft-sahib attempts to address, there's been some discussion of adjusting wording to make it clear that the status code is also useable when a request is refused for legal reasons in absence of an actual legal demand -- e.g., when the server wishes to serve the response, but believes that some legal obligation prevents them from doing so.

Please discuss. If there seems to be support, we'll do a formal CfA (incorporating feedback already received).

Cheers,

Mark and Tommy