Re: [ogpx] Protocol for permitting policy decisions

[Joshua Bell <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Morgaine <[e-mail]>wrote;wrote:

>
> That's a great description of the ultimate interop dystopia in which,
> through definition of arbitrary set membership criteria by an arbitrary
> number of policy makers, the result of transitive policy transference and
> policy intersection is that the set of visitable worlds is the empty set.
>
> Are we trying to create an interop protocol here, or a protocol for
> preventing interop?
>

:) Honestly, I was trying to riff on the thread (AD and RD sharing
information about agents to make policy decisions), rather than propose
anything. I think an attempt to define a global set of characteristics about
users that enable all policy decisions is hopeless - cultures, laws, and
individuals are too varied and rich. That leaves pair-wise negotiation
and/or trust networks, which IMHO needs to happen *if* there are to be
service-level distinctions for most cases anyway.

What I forgot to say is: on the Web, as you move between sites you accept
various terms of service. Attempts to have your browser automatically
negotiate with sites over content have been extremely limited - things like
the defunct PICS (you tell your browser to allow a third party site to rate
the site you intend to visit), or Google's features which block
malware/phishing sites (and I believe are used by current browsers as well
when you just type a URL). Your user-agent (Web browser) does *not* have a
built-in lawyer that agrees to a TOS on your behalf, however. (I'm having
flashbacks of "Diamond Age" here - is that the right novel?)

In the VWRAP space, I don't believe your VW agent domain will be capable of
doing that in a totally generalized, automated way either... so either it
will have some a priori knowledge of the RD via some manner (pair-wise
negotiation, trust network, etc), defer to the user to accept the TOS, or
simply block access.

In other words: "Just like the web, except where it's different" once again.

I'm leaning ever more strongly towards David's position that only services
> should carry expressions of policy, not domains, because in the direction in
> which this discussion is heading there will be no widespread interop at all.
>

I need to re-read Meadhbh's drafts to internalize the formal terminology
(yeah, my bad), but in my head a "domain" is a deployment model for a set of
conceptually related services, but it's the service end-points that exist at
the protocol level. We talk about domains as clusters of conceptually
related services as a crutch so we don't have to enumerate the specific
services in each conversation.