Re: Evolution in action (Re: Thinking differently)

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Wednesday, 02 April, 2003 08:27 +0200 Harald Tveit 
Alvestrand <[e-mail]> wrote:

>>...
>> idiot isps who configured route filters but did not bother to
>> maintain them.  darwin at work.  the subject is
>> uninteresting, as the study of stupidity is an exceedingly
>> target-rich environment.
>
> for those of us who are endlessly fascinated by watching
> evolution in action - what was the previous usage of 69/8 that
> led to those filters being installed?
>
> (parenthesis: similar things have reportedly happened to
> people using .info for email - there turns out to be a number
> of MTAs in the world who have hardcoded all the non-2-letter
> TLDs, assuming "there will be no more", and routinely toss
> mail from/to the newer ones. They, too, deserve the pain they
> get; unfortunately they, like the route filterers, don't get
> all the pain they cause.)

See draft-klensin-name-filters-00.txt for a longer explanation 
of this issue and some cases other than mail-tossing.   I'm 
working on a version that fills in the empty sections and 
clarifies anything that I can find that isn't clear;  comments 
and suggestions welcome.

The evolutionary implications of this one are, however, somewhat 
less clear than those of the 69/8 case.  In the 69/8 case, the 
ISPs who did the filtering were ultimately subject to attack by 
their own customers who, presumably, would sooner or later go 
elsewhere (or cause other harm to the ISP) if the problem wasn't 
fixed.  An MTA-operator whom I'm paying to receive and deliver 
my mail is (or should be) subject to roughly the same pressures. 
But, in the TLD case, the victims are mostly those who have 
registered in the new domains and the help desks of registrars 
and unrelated servers, neither of whom have significant leverage 
on the offending ISPs in the non-MTA cases.

It might also be part of a good case for not creating new gTLDs 
except where they are needed for technical reasons (pretty much 
a null set), but please hold any discussion on that subject on 
the whining-at-ICANN list of your choice.  Spending excessive 
time on that one of course leads to another example of evolution 
in action :-(.

    john