North American Network Operators Group

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Re: fixing insecure email infrastructure (was: Re: [eweek article] Window of "anonymity" when domain exists, whois not updated yet)

  • From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine
  • Date: Wed Jan 12 18:51:59 2005

Taking your comment in reverse order.

> Or, alternately, you're simply saying that those who care about net
> abuse are shackled by ICANN's bylaws and therefore we can do nothing.

I don't think you have a monopoly on "care" (or clue) about net abuse,
but it is pretty clear that you're not tall enough to ride the ICANN
roller coaster.

Thus far, all you've done is recycle the policy claim of the trademarks
interests, a highly effective "stakeholder" and rational entity within
ICANN, and the policy claim of the law enforcement interests, typically
American, and not an organic ICANN "stakeholder", and neither effective
nor rational within ICANN (personal opinion, from the first FBI/LE UWHOIS
meeting, March 2000 WDC if memory serves, to the present).

Now why should that catch your attention? How about because neither of
these policy authors (good, bad or simply ugly) care particularly about
SMTP, in fact, the trademark policy author doesn't know that SMTP exists,
because the use of trademarks in SMTP envelopes or bodies has not been
argued (yet) to support a dilution claim. As the FBI/LE goal set isn't
coherent or rational I'm going to assign it a protocol independent end
point identifier goal, because I don't think the FBI/LE goal set is as
limited as SMTP.

This thread however is about SMTP, and some glop that might make it
differently, or less "insecure".

So, if your primary policy tool is the same policy tool used by actors
seeking ends indifferent to yours, either you are lucky or you are wrong.

Now, is ICANN part of the problem space? It is for me, but I'm trying
to compete with entrenched monopoly in the registry space that has the
single greatest control over domain name policy, and entrenched cartel
in the registrar space, and no technical issue, not secure operation of
the root zone servers, correctness of the gtld zone servers, SLA metrics
for gtld registry systems, data escrow, etc., has displaced the trademark
position on whois:43 for the most important policy or operational issue
for that corporation. My competitors (measured by market share) are for
the most part indifferent to spam, porn, and social policy generally.

Is it for you? Apparently not. So just leaving the trademarks people in
charge should solve your problem in finite time. That means you may have
already won.

Eric