How can the engineering community and the users meet ?
19 September 2007 | Published in DNS, ICANN, Internet, Internet Engineering Task Force | 4 Comments
There is currently a discussion going on between Milton Mueller and Patrik Fältström over the deployment of DNSSEC on the root servers. I think the discussion exemplifies the difficult relation between those who develop standards and those who use them.
On the one hand, Milton points out that the way the signing of the root zone will be done will have a great influence on the subjective trust people and nation states will have towards the system. On the other hand, Patrik states that “DNSSEC is just digital signatures on records in this database”. Both are right, of course, but they do not speak the same language. It is just like saying that a spam e-mail which is RFC (2)822 compliant is a legitimate one. From a technical point of view, it certainly is. From a social point of view, it is still an annoyance.
There is this often expressed feeling in the engineering community that technological choices are politically neutral by design. Nothing is further away from truth, as has been demonstrated by people like Lawrence Lessig. The development of standards is done exclusively by companies. Notice, for example, that those attending IETF meetings do it on company time and budget. The actual users are absent. The logic that says that IETF meetings are open to all is flawed by the fact that an average IETF meeting will cost you around $1500 to attend. Hence, there is an economic barrier to the participation of individuals. Additionally, the influence you might have on a process is proportional to the consideration you get from your peers. Newcomers need quite some time to get accepted by the community, especially if they are not engineers.
Companies are driven by the market. If there is no potential market, there is no need to develop a new standard. A good example of this is the fact that you cannot yet send an e-mail to, say, brønshøj@københavn.dk or addresses in native Cyrillic, Arabic or Asian scripts. Pretty soon, the right hand side will be dealt with, thanks to IDNs. But the use of non-ASCII character sets on the left hand side is still a not standardized. The EAI working group in the IETF has only been launched a few months ago. Why did it take so long ? I guess that the need for this has only appeared in recent years. As long as the Internet was mainly used by the American / Western European world, being restricted to 7 bit ASCII was not much of an annoyance, if at all. Now that the user base has enlarged to include countries that do not use the latin alphabet, it becomes a hot topic. However, it will take years before this can be implemented in the software we use every day. Notice, for example, that most operating systems today still require the user name to be in 7 bit ASCII.
Similar issues exist with RIRs, where again the actual IP address users are absent for the same set of reasons detailed above. However, which IPv6 prefix is going to be allocated by your ISP to your home network in a few years from now is an important one. Yet, those who are active in policy development at the RIR level are those very ISPs. The policy will be related to their commercial interest, which may – or may not – match the user’s interests.
End users are represented in ICANN. I am the first to admit that ALAC may be far from perfect, but it has the merit to exist and we can improve it. Isn’t time for a similar concept for the IETF, the RIRs and all those bodies that have a crucial effect on our user experience while using the Internet ? Being closer to user needs, without the filtering of the marketing department, may help prioritize the future developments.
20 September 2007 at 7:39 (#)
Interesting article, but I have a small fix to make. The EAI working group, which works on Internationalized Email Addresses have been founded in March 2006, 18 months ago (http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ima/current/msg00178.html). And, as often with the IETF, the actual work started even before.
True, it should have been done earlier, true, the work pace is too slow, but there is something going one, the happy volunteers do work.
20 September 2007 at 22:41 (#)
Why do you say that “which IPv6 prefix is going to be allocated by your ISP to your home network in a few years from now is an important one”? Why should it make any difference to me which of the billions of network prefixes is assigned to me? Do you know about a special group of prefixes that work better than the rest?
21 September 2007 at 9:46 (#)
Leo,
To be more specific, the reference to the IPv6 prefix is connected to a recent discussion that popped up on the Ripe Address policy list.
To summarize, there might be a need in a few years from now to have several subnets on a home network. Thus, an ISP should allocate more than a /64 to CPEs, because one cannot subnet a /64.
RFC3177 recommends a /48 for home sites, but it is not the path RIRs have followed since. Agree, /48 may be overkill and certainly a /56 would be enough for home sites. This is a discussion we should have. Which forum holds that discussion is not really important as such, as long as the results are effectively implemented.
This may have consequences further down on the IP address allocations to ISPs. From an industrial point of view, the Linksys, D-Link and other home CPE manufacturers should be made aware their boxes may need to support subnetting in IPv6. Given these boxes can have a rather long lifetime, it may be worth planning ahead.
21 September 2007 at 10:27 (#)
Patrick,
No-one has argued in favour of assigning just a /64 to an ordinary domestic connection. In fact, no-one is suggesting that ISPs should not be able to assign a /48 to a domestic connection, either.
The proposal you are presumably talking about suggests using a /56 as the unit for measuring how full an ISP’s allocation is. The issue the is being debated — and yes this is mostly by ISPs — is how much pain an ISP should bear before it can get more space. Should an ISP be required to pack more assignments into its allocation or should it have more breathing room and be able to put more hierarchy into its network?
If end users want to take part in discussions then they are welcome to do so. But there haven\’t been any proposals to cause extra pain to domestic Internet users yet.