North American Network Operators Group

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Re: If you have nothing to hide

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Sun Aug 04 20:30:17 2002

On Sun, 4 Aug 2002, Dave Crocker wrote:
> These are technical operations matters.  Seems like there might be some
> benefit in formulating consensus views within the technical operations
> community.
>
> Any chance that an IETF BCP would be possible and helpful?

There is a difference between technical/operational matters and policy
matters.  I respectfully disagree this can be treated as a technical
problem.

For example, Bellcore wrote the technical standard for Caller-ID, but
Caller-ID policy varies widely throughout the telephone system.  Ever
notice how telemarketers never seem to have valid Caller-ID.  That is
not a really technical problem.  Likewise Internet source address
validation has a technical part, and a policy part.  For the technical
parts the IETF has RFC2827.  The policy questions are how should it be
enforced, by whom?  Since the end of "connected status" there hasn't
really been a way to control who can use what addresses to connect to the
Internet.

One issues is the RFCs aren't written as regulations.  It would be a bad
idea to attempt to enforce them as written.  They are useful as guidance
to network operators, but as anyone who has ever tried to write a TCP/IP
stack from scratch using nothing but the RFCs (yes, people have tried), it
doesn't work.

> Diverse input to a government process can be good for learning about
> choices, but consensus views should be helpful for making them.

What group is the best forum for developing consensus views on
Internet operation policy issues?

One of the Mr. Clarke's complaints in his speech was there is no group
the government can go to find out what the consensus view of Internet
operators is.  IETF doesn't appear to want to take on that role.  NANOG
isn't structured to develop policies for ISPs.  IOPS, ICANN, ISPSEC, etc
have issues.  ATIS, ITU, NRIC, NSTAC would love to take on the role.

The National Cybersecurity Plan (or whatever the final name ends up) will
be announced in September.  The next NANOG meeting is October 27-29.  The
next IETF meeting is November 17-21.