Re: net.stewards [Re: BitTorrent (Was: Re: [Isms] ISMS charter broken- onus should be on WG to fix it)]

In message <432A92C1.5040003@zurich.ibm.com>, Brian E Carpenter writes:
>Michael Thomas wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Perfect. And then someone with less clue decided to
>> plant Kudzu. We have nothing to say about that?
>
>I just read today that kudzu extract may reduce the desire
>for alcohol (Scientific American, 8/2005, p 17). What seems
>evil may not always be evil.

Have you ever lived in the southern U.S.?  It's amazing driving through 
some areas, where you see kudzu covering trees, barns, telephone polls, 
and some slow-moving cows...

>> 
>> I know that we aren't the net.cops, but are we not
>> net.stewards either?
>
>Up to a point, but there are limits to what we can do.
>
>We can request that the RFC Editor not publish things we think
>are damaging. The IESG does this a few times a year. Similarly,
>we can request that IANA not register things we think are
>damaging, or at least to label them as potentially dangerous.
>
>We can publish screeds about damaging practices. The IAB does this
>a few times a year.
>
>We can try to develop non-damaging solutions for requirements where
>the easy solutions are damaging, and we can try to repair our own
>damage (as HTTP 1.1 repairs HTTP 1.0).
>
>We can try to ensure that the Internet can 'route around damage' -
>that's one of the main reasons for defending the e2e principle,
>for example.
>
>But we can't prevent people from deploying solutions that we
>didn't develop, and we shouldn't even try to IMHO.
>

Agreed.  Sometimes the IETF does the initial engineering, sometimes it 
has to do garbage collection and repair, and hope that the operators 
can cope in the meantime.

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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