North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Fwd: Re: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt?

  • From: Paul Vixie
  • Date: Sun Oct 28 18:11:12 2001 
> I was using legitimate in the sense of 'e-mail that the receiver
> wanted to receive'.  ...

So this now boils down to "if the sender and receiver of a packet/session/etc
are both interested in having it take place, then noone in the middle shall be
allowed to deliberately prevent this from occuring."

What would you mean by "deliberate" in this case?  If "e-mail between
consenting adults" was blocked because some NOC person was trying to stop
a DDoS attack that happened to use the same source or destination address
as the "consenting" e-mail was coming from or going to?  Should that be
illegal?  If not, then why wouldn't a mailserver operator trying to block
spam be allowed to do the same thing?

> I also think it's very important to get past the 'who pays' argument.
> It's a good argument from a technology point of view, or from the
> individual's point of view, but it doesn't work in the abstract.

On the contrary this argument is at its best in the abstract.

> Worst case is someone will develop and popularize (or legislate) a
> settlement system where the sender can pay for the entire transaction.

A law allowing someone to make micropayments to the telco I get my T1 from,
and to the vendor I buy replacement drives for my RAID box from, and so on,
and which further _required_ me to have my costs offset in this manner, is
beyond rational consideration and I refuse to even discuss it.

Requiring that my inbox have a determinate bank account attached to it so
that these micropayments can be made to me without any explicit contract
between myself and potential senders is on the borderline of irrationality:
we could discuss it but I don't think we'd get anywhere in finite time.

This leaves the requirement that I enter into an agreement before costs are
shifted in my direction.  That's where we are right now.

And that's why the "who pays" argument is at its _best_ in the abstract.