Re: Working Group Last Call for draft-ietf-httpbis-legally-restricted-status

[Alex Rousskov <[e-mail]>]

On 10/12/2015 11:58 PM, Matthew Kerwin wrote:

> ​Sorry for chiming in cluelessly at this point, but how is 403 silent?

It is silent in the context of this discussion where the premise is that
403 is not sufficient to inform the recipient of the censorship. In
other words, 403 is presumed to be silent about the censorship, not
about the blocking. This is not my premise, this is the premise of the
draft. If you disagree with that premise, you should attack the draft,
rather than my failed attempts to allow the drafted mechanism to cover
more censorship scenarios.


> while people clearly care about the
> Ministry of Truth interfering with access to resources, at least in the
> present climate, I don't know how much people care about other "outside
> forces" blocking access. Is there much value in what you propose?

If you assume that the "Ministry of Truth" is a well defined concept
that "people clearly care about" while "other outside forces" is not,
then my proposal adds no value, of course.

My assumption is that most people (in a non-US sense of the word, i.e.,
excluding corporations) can actually define "outside forces" and care
about them in general, rather than being interested in whether the
blocking company received a written DMCA takedown notice, was visited by
a friendly group of armed enforcers, or read an anonymous article in the
"official news paper".


> I'm struggling to envision a
> case of externally-pressured censorship that doesn't count as "legal."

Great, you should not object to removing the word "legal" from the draft
then. Saying "external censorship" should be sufficient. Why muddy the
waters by introducing precise-sounding but still undefined and very
context-dependent terms?


Cheers,

Alex.