North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Journal of Internet Disasters

  • From: Howard C. Berkowitz
  • Date: Tue Nov 17 16:11:50 1998

At 11:04 AM -0800 11/17/98, J.D. Falk wrote:
>On 11/16/98, Dave Crocker <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> That does not mean no oversight.  It merely means finding non-governmental
>> methods of achieving the oversight.  I suggest, for example, that a
>> competent and careful effort of the type Sean is suggesting would go a
>> long, long way towards helping things, by providing public and clear
>> explanations of problems.  Yes, it is possible that some ISPs would choose
>> to ignore the public disclosure, but let's worry about that problem after
>> give simple, public discourse a try.  Such an approach has a good track on
>> the Internet.
>
>	Furthermore...I'd be willing to bet that if the FCC or whoever
>	got a lot of complaints, they'd form an oversight committee.
>
>	Why not just form one ourselves, making sure that it's answerable
>	to the needs of the Internet community?
>
>--

Let me begin this by saying emphatically that I am _NOT_ proposing to put
any Internet operational procedures under the Official Standards
Infrastructure. (When I did OSI at COS, I always asked my boss that I
understood what the OSI infrastructure is, but I was unclear about the
superstructure.  Ian said that he would be as good an example as any.)

In non-IP networking, there are certainly things that go beyond national
boundaries and are operationally critical.  RF spectrum allocations, for
example, are a different matter than ISO or ITU protocol development. True,
the UN has no internal means of sending a missile at a transmitter on an
illegal frequency.

To me, there's a reasonably close analogy between the Internet routing
space and the global RF spectrum.  There are collisions if people use the
same frequency/prefix (I am _not_ going to get into line-of-sight issues).
Is someone familiar enough with the procedures for dealing with
inappropriate spectrum use to see if there might be any parallels for
Internet operations?


Howard,

who remembers a presentation at AFCEA where an Israeli Air Force general
was asked about the best electronic countermeasures they had found to use
against Soviet-bloc radar.  He suggested that very few jammers, range gate
stealers, etc., really compared to a laser-guided bomb down the feed horn
of the antenna.