RE: [soac-mapo] Is selective blocking by local governments really a problem?

["Terry L Davis, P.E." <tdavis2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Antony

 

I don't really think blocking specific "names" will ever work.  Every day
the spammers find new and interesting name variations for what they are
offering to get by my email filters with.  I think the same will true in our
case.

 

As Andrei notes, blocking today is really hard!  But what to watch are the
coming changes.

 

Few things to watch in terms of blocking.

-          BGP routing has scaled about as far as we can push a
fundamentally conceptually broken protocol.  Its replacement will be
critical here; if it is "location based", a lot of our assumptions about the
difficulty of blocking may need to change.

 

-          Expect to see more global entities, especially in the financial
sector, to  develop "closed and tightly encryption networks" for their
business uses.  (i.e. A follow-on, don't do your online banking at an open
access wireless point regardless of who's or which country!)

 

-          The blocking and other nation/state laws regarding an ISP's
responsibility for service within their boundaries (including airspace) are
not new.  We will deal with them.  Most wireless mobile platforms are
"location aware" and adjust their firewalls, protocols, and other services
to accommodate nation/state laws where they are.

 

-          If IPv6 address allocations align with nation/state boundaries,
we may have a problem!

 

-          As blocking increases, expect to see encryption increase.  If I
block all encrypted transmissions, then I probably shut my own internal
economy down.

 

-          Expect to see new providers that offer email, banking, basic web
access, etc; via a two-factor VPN service.

 

-          Expect to see a lot of the new business networks to require you
to have a "secure cyber ID" to use them.   There will still be Internet
"anonymity" but you won't want to use it for all your Internet uses,
especially financial.

 

-          Most troubling to me are the initial moves by various ISP
themselves to block protocols and/or "prioritize" traffic they carry.  This
is in my mind the most probable actor in "Internet fragmentation"; more so
than nation/state laws.

 

I do understand the political need for something like MAPO; I just don't
know to do it reasonably without tossing more delays into the new TLD
process.

 

Take care

Terry

 

PS: Remember how long the XXX domain has been in play; seemed to make great
sense for use by any country's legal system but it wasn't that simple.

 

From: owner-soac-mapo@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-soac-mapo@xxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Antony Van Couvering
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 1:58 PM
To: soac-mapo
Subject: [soac-mapo] Is selective blocking by local governments really a
problem? 

 

What's the conflict between varying degrees of permissiveness and the
principle of the single, interoperable web?

 

At first glance it seems intractable.  If the lowest common denominator is
used, so that the entire world will see only what the least permissive
society allows, then as Avri points out it would intolerable for most of us.
On the other hand, If local communities are not allowed to block what they
deem offensive (e.g., much of the Internet, in the UAE's case), they will go
off and create another Internet according to their standards, and the
unified root remains an ideal but is no longer a reality.   To me, this has
always seemed to be the biggest conceptual hurdle.

 

But the problem may not be so great.  While Evan's litany of what the UAE
censors block is shocking to many of us, we should consider that there are
plenty of instances in the "west" where we are not allowed to see certain
content.   This includes financial information of others, medical records,
anything behind a paywall, anything that requires a password that you don't
have.   In some hotels and airline lounges, you can connect to the Internet,
but only browse the company site until the staff gives you a code.   This is
not what the UAE blocks (though they might block this as well), but they are
nonetheless limitations on our ability to use the Internet.  There are many
such examples.

 

In each case, you have a local community allowing some content and
disallowing other content, for reasons of policy, morality, property,
privacy and so on.   And yet we still have a unified root and we still have
national laws and customs.  Local communities must (and do) have the right
and ability to some or all users from viewing certain content.  Everyone
does it, for the reasons that appear right to them.  

 

>From this perspective, what we ought then to consider in our group is not
what may be sensitive or not, but rather what rises to the level where the
very existence of the top-level domain causes damage to a large number of
people.  There are obvious examples of such TLDs.  For example, the mere
fact of a TLD whose name mocks or incites violence against some group of
people is very likely to be intolerable to the targeted group.   This, I
think, is a legitimate reason for blocking a TLD application.  If the TLD
name isn't in itself deeply offensive, then we're talking about content
within the TLD, and at that point it's up to local authorities, and
individuals who use the Internet, to block content that they find offensive.
That blocked content might even include an entire TLD -- which is kind of
the premise upon which .XXX was built. 

 

This is definitely not the venue for deciding what value system is superior.
Every society blocks some content, so far without great harm to the
Internet.  So my suggestion is that for the purposes of this group, which is
dedicated to considering questions of morality, is that we forget about what
content the TLD is likely to have (a guess at best), and concentrate only on
the name itself.  I think it will make our task much easier. 

 

Antony