Re: [Pearg] Responding to "Concerns over DNS Blocking" technical error(s)

[Lanlan Pan <[e-mail]>]

Vittorio Bertola <vittorio.bertola=[e-mail]>
于2023年7月31日周一 21:14写道：

>
>
> Il 31/07/2023 04:36 PDT Marwan Fayed <marwan=
> [e-mail]> ha scritto:
>
>
> Dear wg, and more--
>
> There is a just-published open letter [1], also summarized at 117's pearg
> [2] in response to a proposed initiative that (as is summarized) can
> require ISPs to block domains via DNS without a court order.
>
> I also wanted to provide my comments on this topic, as I tried to do so at
> the mic but I was only given 20 seconds, which is an impossible timing for
> any meaningful comment, and so I shut up. Generally speaking, I would find
> in-person meetings more useful if they were less like two hours of slides
> and more like actual discussion of privacy-related issues among people with
> different views.
>
> In particular, with no offense to the signatories and to their good
> intentions, I would like to explain how bad the open letter is when read
> from a French/European policymaker viewpoint. Sorry if I will be blunt at
> times - better than being hypocritical.
>
> First of all, I concur that there are parts of the French law which are
> egregiously wrong; the part about putting surveillance stuff in data
> centres, first of all. Also, the point about not having to disclose
> vulnerabilities before patching them is valid, though this is soon to
> become a Europe-wide requirement via the Cyber Resilience Act. However, the
> effectiveness of this part of the letter is mooted when it repeatedly says
> that informing the French public cybersecurity authority about potential
> exploits will actively reduce security. This implies the statement that
> they are either incompetent or a malicious actor, and, guess what, this
> won't fly well.
>
> However, most of the letter is about DNS/browser blocking, and this is the
> worst part of it.
>
> Let's start from the end: I was infuriated by the final suggestion that
> governments should rather block websites by IP address or by blocking HTTPS
> connections. I, like many other Internet old-timers from European ISOC
> chapters and industry, spent the last 25 years educating our policymakers
> that DNS blocking would be the less bad option in respect to IP address
> blocks, as it would significantly reduce overblocking, it would target the
> end-user identifier and not its potentially transient network location, and
> would be less dangerous in terms of censorship (more on this below). Then,
> Vint Cerf comes and says the opposite, without any kind of involvement of
> the local Internet community. It's not just wrong and counterproductive,
> it's rude.
>
> Now, the arguments offered against blocking are the usual ones that
> European policymakers have heard again and again and already dismissed in
> the past. Yes, DNS blocking is imperfect and circumventable, but that's a
> feature, not a bug; it is exactly an intrinsic guarantee against abuse for
> political censorship. The point of these blocks is to make it somewhat hard
> for the average non-technical user to watch illegal football match streams,
> so that it's more convenient for them to just pay the legal streaming
> service. The point is not to establish an effective political censorship
> tool, and suggesting so, as the letter does, is insulting to the French
> parliament's integrity.
>
> Also, the argument that France shouldn't do this because it would motivate
> dictatorships to do the same doesn't work. Dictatorships already block
> stuff with everything they have, no matter what France does.
>
> The argument "we cannot implement these blocks in our DNS resolvers
> because they would apply to the whole world" is very hard to believe. This
> is said by a VP of the same company that runs Youtube, where you get a
> "this content is not allowed in your country" message every five minutes.
> Global resolvers could just geolocate requests or segment them by country
> via routing, and apply each country's filters accordingly. Yes, this
> requires a bit of cost and effort, and the real problem is exactly that.
>

+1, geolocate dns request (block) + geolocate web content load(filter)


> Even in Europe, DNS operators do not like mandatory filters: apart from
> any principle consideration, they create costs and liabilities. Yet they
> have been implementing them for decades now, because it's the law. The
> letter is about Google and other global resolvers not being willing to play
> by the same rules, trying to tilt competition in the DNS resolution market
> and keep their competitive advantage of being able to make illegal content
> available - illegal content which is not political dissent, but football
> matches, CSAM, unlicensed gambling and the likes. It is really about
> corporations that want to be socially irresponsible to make more money.
>
> So, how is this letter going to be perceived? From a principle viewpoint,
> it looks like a group of Americans (plus the IAB Chair, who possibly
> underestimated the geopolitical reading of this letter) telling France to
> be less French and more American in terms of the compromise between public
> order and free expression. From an industry viewpoint, it looks like
> Google's lobbying effort to protect their position in the French DNS
> market.
>
> I am sure that the nice people at European digital rights groups like La
> Quadrature or EDRi will support this letter, but I don't think that it will
> be successful in parliaments or that it will advance the cause of the open
> Internet. It will just reconfirm the perception of this Silicon Valley big
> tech circle (including the IETF) which doesn't want to play by European
> rules. I'd not be surprised if the law proceeded without changes.
>
> --
>
> Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
> [e-mail]
> Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
>
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