Re: Nomination for promotion to "Proposed Standard"

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

--On 27. oktober 2003 12:08 -0800 ned.freed@mrochek.com wrote:

> > I talked to Ted and Steve (among others) about the RMX thing in Chicago,
> > and agree fully with your analysis of "we need to do something", with
> > "document the cases for which it is broken" being high on the list of
> > "somethings".
>
> Harald, as I said before, I have serious misgivings about any approach
> that
> puts us in the position of opposing such schemes unconditionally. Any
> document
> we produce in this space needs to examine both the features and the
> faults of
> such schemes. Focusing on the potential damage they do would be a mistake
> IMO.

I agree, and I was asking to do something in a positive sense - that 
doesn't mean that we don't need to warn about the side effects, but we 
shouldn't get paralyzed by their existence.

The worst outcome, IMHO, would be to see the community deploy four 
different  schemes of this sort, all of them gaining market share, and 
neither one being the "recognized leader". If we end up there, we have 
failed, no matter whether we have blessed, cursed or ignored them.
> More generally, I think the question we all need to keep in the back of
> our
> minds is the very real possibility of widespread deployment of even more
> draconian schemes. For example, what if all the major service providers
> were to
> enact schemes similar to the one AT&T used recently?

Steve Bellovin was on the phone about that one in Chicago..... even ONE 
large service provider doing this worries me significantly; several of them 
doing the same thing with different lists worries me even more.

One opportunity/danger of the RMX schemes is that it could be the way to 
make an AT&T-style block feasible - "if you don't do this, you don't get to 
send us mail". But I'd much rather worry about this in the context of 
evaluating schemes, picking one (?), documenting the advantages and the 
disadvantages, and doing so in a public forum, than either to do nothing or 
to hash it all out on the IESG list.

Let's find the right thing to do, and do it.

               Harald