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Re: Fwd: Re: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt?

  • From: Leo Bicknell
  • Date: Sun Oct 28 18:29:05 2001

On Sun, Oct 28, 2001 at 03:08:36PM -0800, Paul Vixie wrote:
> 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."

Yes, i would think so.  If both parties want it, and both pay for
their part, no one should interfear in the middle.

> 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'll defer the illegal question for the moment, and merely say that
yes, I believe it is wrong.  I'll accept him potentially delaying
the e-mail, but tossing it due some other problem is very much a bad
idea.

To borrow a current analogy.  Consider if the postal service announced
today that to stop the spread of anthrax they were just going to burn
all of the mail currently in the system.  After all, it's for the
greater good.

> 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.

Oh, I think the bean counters and legislators could get somewhere
quickly.  Do the settlements payed between RBOC's and CLEC's have
anything to do with costs?  Nope.  Someone has decided it costs
$0.06 (or whatever it is) to terminate a call.  If it costs you
less, good for you, if it costs you more tough luck.

They could easily legislate that mail servers must be registered,
and each e-mail results in a $0.06 fee transfered from sender to
receiver.  If it costs you more tough, and if it costs you less
good for you.  You'd need a license to run a mail server, in which
case you'd have to have the clearing house infrastructure, or you
could contract the mail server service to your ISP.  You'd have an
open account, and your balance would go up or down with your ratio
of e-mail.

It "works" in the telco world.  It could be argued it's not much
more complicated for ISP's than managing BGP relationships and
billing customers.  Most importantly I can see accounting people
and legislators being all for it.

I think this is about the worst thing that can happen.  But, if
you argue to capitol hill that you're eating someone else's costs
I'll bet they find a way to compensate you before they find a way
to just prevent it, since most of them think business is good, in
any form.

Note, I'm waiting for this to happen with cell phones.  As people
move from land lines to cell phones which can't be tele-solicited
today I can see a cell provider offering a value add service where
the telemarketer can pay an additional fee to cover the costs of
the call.  It's 1-800 in reverse, billing the sender.  More $$$'s
for cell providers, and if telemarketers find it's the only way to
reach people I'm sure they will pay to do it.  Once the receiver
isn't being charged for the calls I doubt and legislative body
would block it.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - [email protected] - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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