Re: Last Call: Modern Global Standards Paradigm

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 11, 2012, at 9:41 PM, SM wrote:
> Here is a rough estimate of users for one content provider:
> 
>   US     158,758,940
>   Brazil  54,902,560
>   India   51,925,180
>   UK      37,569,580
>   France  24,345,920
>   Italy   21,822,640
>   Canada  17,474,940
>   Spain   16,075,560
>   Egypt   11,513,720
>   Russia   5,560,080
>   Romania  4,928,100
>   Tunisia  3,107,040
>   Libya      608,380
>   China      520,780
>   Uganda     444,560
> 
> If tomorrow Italy decides to adopt a "sending party pays" model it 
> may still be financially viable for the content provider to remain in 
> that market.  It may not work that well for Uganda.
> 
> If tomorrow Libya decides that it would be in its interest to control 
> access to the Internet, operators can route around the problem as we 
> all know that's how the Internet works.

These operators are (hypothetically) Libyan citizens, right?  Residents of Libya who could go to jail for routing around the problem. Most likely on a charge of espionage. 

> Well, not really, if most of 
> the traffic passes through one international gateway.  

The number of international gateways does not matter, if all the operators have to comply with the government's blacklist, or have to install a government-mandated policy on a government-mandated firewall.

> You can send 
> traffic over port 443 to prevent eavesdropping as that port is 
> secure.  Well, not really, if the user already trusts the wrong SSL 
> certificate.

Not trusting the certificate just means you get annoying warnings. It won't let you circumvent it. Living in an authoritarian country means you don't get to play cat & mouse with your government

> If you are on an Internet governance soapbox you might as well talk 
> about how the US is evil and it should not be the only country 
> running the Internet.  You might also want to add that having only 13 
> root nameservers is all part of a conspiracy and that the IETF must 
> fix that.  Obviously someone must be running this Internet thing or 
> else you will have to review your belief system.

I thought it was Al Gore running the Internet from his garage, no?

Yoav